First of all, Atom CPU is only "efficient" power-wise when it's sitting idle most of the time.
It's not efficient per task accomplished for power used.
Secondly, "dropping an atom bomb onto *" happens to reference one of the most horrible things the United States has done to any other country, regardless if you agree if it was unnecessary or not, so implying the reference is very distasteful.
I was going to be snarky and ask,"Do you use a 386 to go shopping at the grocery store?" but then realized I use an Apple A4/Cortex-A8 to go shopping at the grocery store. (Never mind whatever is embedded in my car.)
I think I'm going to steal that analogy anyway, because I love baffling metaphors. The nice thing would be using the Canadarm to put things in your cart, especially heavy items such as cat litter and gallons of milk.
I think I'll wait for someone like Jon Stokes to talk about SeaMicro before getting too excited about how 64-bit processors mean you can address 4Gb of RAM.
CPU speed doesn't concern me, as memory access/front-side bus tends to be the bottleneck in the applications I'm interested in. But non-EEC is a problem. Intel intentionally crippled Atom to not cannibalize its server business. I think a similar platform but with Arm Cortex-A15 would be even more interesting.
I think it may have been Google that found that random RAM errors are quite likely over the course of a year, so you really want ECC memory if you're running a server and need uptime.
I was going to ask you for a citation but realized that would be lazy when I could google[1] it myself. I've had a couple arguments with a hosting provider all but ignoring RAM errors, with them responding,"I rebooted and watched it for a few days, and it seems to have cured the issue."
[1] Do you ever think "bing it" will catch on? I think I've discovered their growth constraint factor.
My brain had a hash collision with SEAForth and thought that it would be exceedingly unlikely to get much traction if they're expecting people to program enterprise software in Forth.
Reading between the lines: does this thing have the same issues with I/O that virtual machines tend to have? (That doesn't make it useless, of course...)
* Interestingly, they use the same image at the beginning of that article and this one. They also seemed to re-use a lot of the original article text in this one.
* Most people were quick to point out that Intel's Atom processors don't support ECC RAM, and at the scale we're talking about here, RAM errors statistically will be common.
* From the article:
Full told, SeaMicro eliminates 90 percent of the
components from a system board. SeaMicro calls this
CPU/IO virtualization.
{edit} The gigaom article was 4 months before the original VentureBeat one (8 months ago vs 1 year ago). For some reason I was doing the date math in my head in base10 (i.e. 1 year = 10 months). Maybe it's time for bed.
Oh wait, no.