Doesn't virtualization make this sort of thing obsolete? If your performance requirements are modest enough to work on a micro server, wouldn't they work in a virtualized environment? It seems like it'd be cheaper (software does the work hardware is doing here), easier on maintenance and provide high availability in a virtualized environment as well. I'm not talking big iron, I'm talking $3-$5k boxes which seem to be the sweet spot.

Something like this might be good for a smaller business with machines on-site. You could replace a rack of beefy heat generating boxes with a few of these and save on power+AC bills.

From a data center perspective, I think it has some merit too. If they produce the machines in small little blade-type servers that you can just plug into a box, wouldn't that simplify maintenance? And for availability, if a box dies, it doesn't take down 20 different vms with it.

Interesting spin by Intel. Having recently priced out power and cooling costs I can see where ARM hopes to be, but Intel having a 64bit offering before ARM does is definitely an advantage. Now if the chipsets let me put 96GB on each chip (sadly another 36 - 50 watts) we'll really be interested.