Interesting that a MAC was moved on-chip, but it's only Gigabit and only one channel. Sounds to me more like a BOM reduction aimed at workstations and low-end servers that don't need much network bandwidth rather than being inteded for heavy duty use (since even the Intel C2000 have 4x 1/2.5 GbE MACs).

> The neat bit is that activating the GPU on one of these Xeon E3 processors only adds a single watt to the thermal profile of the chip and only a few bucks to the cost.

Well I very much doubt that in practice. Perhaps Intel's TDP scenario here is "no outputs connected and no framebuffer active" or something like that.