What's important to keep in mind is the progress that AMD has been making with their Heterogeneous System Architecture. With high-frequency RAM (especially when

What's important to keep in mind is the progress that AMD has been making with their Heterogeneous System Architecture. With high-frequency RAM (especially when we start seeing widespread availability of DDR4) shared between a CPU and GPU that share a single die, all of this communications overhead goes away. There is limited software support right now, because this architecture is very new, but on the benchmarks that take advantage of the on-die GPU, AMD's latest can keep up with and surpass much more expensive i7s. We're still at a point where it's unclear that AMD's HSA will take a commanding lead, but it's promising, especially considering the price/power requirements for an A10 (~$160 currently), vs the equivalent of a high end GPU and a Xeon. You could, ignoring storage and peripherals (reasonable in a server farm arrangement) put together many more iGPU boxes than Xeon/dGPU boxes. Even assuming moderate gains from GPU acceleration, high-throughput database servers could be made cheaper through this method.