Perspectives on SeaMicro's Innovative Intel Atom Server

It doesn't consume all that much CPU, though it is possible to saturate it. The trick is to take advantage of the smooth scaling model: you an add memcached nodes until you run out of nodes. The clients have a list of nodes as part of their configuration, and the client runs the hashing function, which includes mapping the entry into the proper node.

So the only real overhead that each node has to deal with is serialization.

It's very simple, so it works very well. :)

Someone needs to make a dedicated hardware key-value store which would use way less power than even this dense atom box.

If you have $10M spare, contact me ;)

Yes, that's an interesting question, although I wonder what you precisely mean by "scale out".

E.g. one thing that comes to mind is management, although it's pretty clear that VPS hosting providers have means of dealing with many many Xen instances.

With 2 GB max per core, space will be at a premium, the smallest practical Dom0 will be desired (I use Xen as an example because it the one I'm familiar with). VM load balancing will likely be required for good service, and the interconnect fabric ought to make that pretty cheap.

Compared to AWS, this particular SeaMicro solution will only provide something like a Small Instance which has 1.7 GB, the next step up is 7.5 GB.

This could prove interesting, I'm sure there are plenty of VPS niches it will service well, if the no ECC issue is not a customer service showstopper as others have wondered on the main HN SeaMicro thread.