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that company is seamicro btw

Upon learning of this, I thought it a clever idea for a next step in addressing the heat issue - at the level of rack servers; data centers; etc.

http://www.seamicro.com/

Not your One Ring that Rules Them All but some problems (most) need to be attacked in pieces.

http://www.seamicro.com/node/164 Here is the Seamicro page on the system. Its using the dual core Atoms.

1. SeaMicro makes ultra high density servers out of Atom chips. Here's one with 512 Atom cpus: http://www.seamicro.com/node/102

I see that they pitch it as replacing 40U's of dual quad cores (8 core machines).
You can now buy 48 core machines easily. That's 7U's worth of servers. And the seamicro one is 10Us. So, it's actually less dense than other offerings (thats's according to SeaMicro).

In terms of power, a 48 core machine draws a bit over 1kw on full, so 7kW for the rack. The seamicro machine has 3 (+1) power supplies. Given the 240V input, that could be anything up to 9kW, ut they don't give full load figures.

So, it doesn't actually seem all that compelling, to be honest.

1. SeaMicro makes ultra high density servers out of Atom chips. Here's one with 512 Atom cpus: http://www.seamicro.com/node/102

2. SeaMicro's offerings are well received so Atom must be fast enough for server use.

3. The faster ARM chips are neck in neck with Atom on integer performance. Their floating point performance sucks but we're talking about regular servers not HPC.

Conclusion: ARMS are fast enough for server workloads.

...aye, 'tis been done before, or at least (really) low powered boxes have been clustered e.g.

PicoCluster
Plan 9 Cluster

and all the way up to SeaMicro's 512 Atom beast

So get some more modern (than the first two examples) SBC's, put them into a rack form factor case (as per the rules), chuck in some Coreboot and then profit.

"The ATOM doesn't support virtualisation in hardware"

Incorrect.

http://www.seamicro.com/?q=node/38
"Processor Specification Intel Z530: 1.6GHz, Single Core, Dual Thread x86 Processor"

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=35463
"Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) - Yes"

This is a good start- SM10000 System Overview

Interconnect is 1.28 Tbps or 2.5 Gbps per core.

I/O includes a minimum or 8 gige or 2 10-gige, which can be increased to 64 gige or 16 10-gige links per chassis.

This unit runs as 512 system images using stock 32 bit OS's. Each CPU may have 1 or 2 GB's of ram and up to 64 local drives may be installed and divided among the CPU's with the included management software. The unit supports PXE boot, so the system images may run off local disk or from a ram image.

Just to note, the Atom z530 is a single core, 32 bit only CPU, if that matters.

I couldn't tell you if the 16 10-gige links would seriously limit this box or not. You'd have to show me a data center with more than 160 Gbps of internet connectivity first. :) And that's assuming you only purchased one of these suckers, because you'd need that much per chassis.