The SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between process

The SGI machines are geared pretty heavily toward supercomputing applications. As such they're tailored for applications that need to share data between processes efficiently, and that also need to do a lot of computing. The SeaMicro server probably would look pretty lousy when compared on SGI's turf, since Atom processors aren't designed to be performance-competitive with the current desktop and server processors. What would make more sense is a comparison a datacenter for a company like Disney or Google or Amazon. I suspect that even though SeaMicro's rig would look pretty bad for heavy number-crunching apps, it would most likely do very well in web and database. Those apps don't need to share a lot of data between threads/processes, and they're generally I/O bound rather than compute bound. With proper caching setups, they're mostly network bound, rather than disk bound also.