Frankly with the Niagra out there, this seems partially redundant. Then again, making I/O tasks, essentially a chain of closures, into reasonable threads is a

Frankly with the Niagra out there, this seems partially redundant. Then again, making I/O tasks, essentially a chain of closures, into reasonable threads is a pretty bad waste by itself... Yup these atoms are essentially I/O processors, just running enough buffer cache management, filesystem, and driver code required to keep other components (network and disk) at high utilization. The benefit for atoms here is the short latency. They have short pipelines (better for the little actual computation required for I/O driving), and there are presumably more cores available here than the equivalent Xeon system (reducing queuing delays).