SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

"Even Ubuntu needs an upgraded graphics card and RAM to utilize all of the bells and whistles."

Bells and whistles are what makes computing fun for the average user. Why do you think the iPhone is such a hit? It's basic functionality? or the fact that you can have a lot of fun on it? It even sucks as a phone and people don't seem to mind.

In my IT business, the first thing I do for most customers is upgrade their RAM because their desktops come so poorly packaged and the performance is abysmal. Once done, I have never heard a complaint.

We need to stop talking about exceptions and start discussing general usage. Most users are running W7 or Mac OS X, and run a multitude of programs, apps and at the same time. I believe in breaking bottlenecks.

Lastly, I am glad to see smaller companies making a difference, like the one in the article.

Great news! Hardware innovation typically means new software opportunities. If this is turns out to be a generally accepted workhorse server design and not just a hotrod box I wonder who will be the first in here to develop a profitable software product for it.

Dell products have features and services that make them enterprise friendly, they are more than just hardware to the customer. So trying to compete with Dell head on might not be the company's best strategy at first. Perhaps following the strategy EMC used with CLARiiON to sell through DELL would be more of a money maker for the company.

Why do you think the iPhone is such a hit? It's basic functionality? or the fact that you can have a lot of fun on it? The iPhone was initially a hit because it was the first smart phone that was really designed for the consumer (before that, the way I see it there were mostly business smartphones). It is a hit today because it is seen as the cool phone to have and it is very well marketed. The eyecandy provides only the finishing touch.

their desktops come so poorly packaged People get what they pay for, and for a lot of people they pay a relatively small amount of money to a company that puts a large markup on the hardware in their PC so they end up with something cheap. Most higher end machines from the likes of Dell are pretty useable on the RAM front from what I see.

Most users are running W7 or Mac OS X On the server this doesn't matter at all. Servers run mostly Linux, generally with no UI. Or Windows Server - which runs with a UI not that much more advanced that what you might have found back with Windows 2000.

Lastly, I am glad to see smaller companies making a difference, like the one in the article. I'm sure we all are - but I don't think that they are making the difference you think they are. A 512 core server set-up won't help any user make a home video, listen to their music or play games. What it will help is large datacenters who can serve more requests simultaneously.

They basically did it's called Larrabee and it is now being transformed into a server product.

There are no information about the chipset, memory specs and extension slots in particular.

It could be a huge bottleneck between CPUs and RAM, because of concurrent access of so many CPUs to the memory while Atoms have a very small caches.

It means that real-world applications, like a multi-threaded services (especially JVM-based, or simply MySQL) could not be used efficiently.

I'm also very skeptical about hundreds of KVMs which is a the only working virtualization technology I know. =)