I think this area has a lot of potential. I'm a fan of Atom-based solutions -- the author is concerned about ECC, which is less of an issue for me. Part of the

I think this area has a lot of potential. I'm a fan of Atom-based solutions -- the author is concerned about ECC, which is less of an issue for me. Part of the problem with Atom solutions to date was the power-hungry chipset that it used to ship with. The current generation chipsets still consume more power than the CPU, but they are a lot better (~10W against ~22W for the 945GSE vs the 945G). Particularly for solutions that rely on redundant nodes, it's a great solution. In the right conditions you could even move to ambient-air cooling and save a huge amount of energy.