....when you can get a proper computer from Dell's outlet for about that.

I've built and installed a few servers now using the Atom chip - and use one as my desktop. Mostly the dual-core version (with dual HT cores). For most LAMPy type stuff they're extremely adequate, and low power to go - which is always a concern in data centres these days. One thing to note: While the CPU may well be only letting off 4W of steam, the rest of the board isn't... The fan isn't on the CPU, it's on the northbridge chip... Last box I installed - dual core, 2GB RAM, dual 250GB WDC SATA drives sucks about 42W.

If you were looking for something in the $300 to $400 range, a refurb Dell or used computer would probably be a lot better spec'ed.

Unless this has some super awesome form factor (a lot smaller then a Mac mini say) I don't see the appeal. I'd like to see a piccy.

As the total cost of a pc is made up more and more of peripherals it makes more sense to try to cut these costs.

Bolt a diskless atom to the back of a display and netboot it for a low-power, small-footprint workstation. You've consolidated your disks to the NAS/SAN, you need less cooling (no disks), smaller psu (no disks, smaller fans) and for business you *still* don't need 3d graphics. You can spend the money on a larger screen, which actually helps people do their work better and more memory for better performance/disk caching.

It probably doesn't make much sense for smaller numbers of users, but for larger establishments it might be an interesting proposition. It should be a relatively easy transition to the fabled "thin-client" environment.

When the power consumption is a quarter of a normal desktop you're looking at big savings. A KWh costs roughly 10-20 eurocents across the EU. Being generous and assuming everyone switches off their work PC outside working hours you get:

40 hrs / week * 45 working weeks / year = 1800 hours per year.

A 40 Watt Atom PC consumes 72 KWh/year with this usage profile, while a 200 Watt desktop consumes 360 KWh/year, so you save 288 KWh/year. In money that's roughly 30-60 euros. For a PC that's on 24/7 the saving is 140-240 euros in electricity per year depending on the country you live in.

Multiply these with the usage you get from your PC (2-5 years) and the purchase price doesn't look so significant anymore.

With power and cooling being a larger and larger part of running a server farm I would think that the Atom processor would be a natural fit. Half the CPU power at a fifth or a tenth of the power consumption would be a win. Build a 2U blade server with 2 or 4 CPUs per card. Each CPU would have 4 Memory slots, some sort of fast flash slot and maybe a 2.5" SATA connector with the disk mounted on the blade board itself. No South/North bridge, no other stuff. I suspect that an Atom CPU with the OS and applications running in 4 Gb of RAM and no local disk would scream. Put 4 of them on a blade, put 10 blades in a 2U chassis. I think the cluster people would be excited. You don't get a lot with each core, but there are so many of them.

Can you get one of these little guys in a form factor the size of a Mac Mini?

Would be nice to get one, with no graphics card, that could run on batteries, for a couple hundred...

Seems like a con to me, seeing as Atom just isn't that fast, it could conceivably be replacing far more powerful hardware. Atom just isn't good value

My home server (600MHz fanless Eden processor, 1Gb RAM, 320Gb HItachi IDE drive) draws only 24W - 32W. Even though the processor is a dog compared to the Atom, it's quite adequate for the usual file/print sharing, email, web proxy use. In other words, a small office could use it without losing patience.

I think we are suffering from Intel's usual blindness around the embedded/SFF business, as the 945G chipset is plainly unsuitable for SFF use.

Can I suggest that every time you buy a new part to tweak that consumption figure down 5-10w, you've probably spent more money than you'll save in lecky over a couple of years?! :-)

I know, 'cos I got caught in that obsession too, but eventually settled with my slow but serviceable low-power Athlon 64 box. It won't ever win any speed records, but does chug along nicely in a cupboard using around 40-50w...

At those price points ($249) for a box, a windoze tax of a relatively small amount (even $100 for Microsoft is relatively small) would really screw up the price of the box.

Can anyone else see the day when Microsoft tries to sell its software for $149 or $200, and that would include the free machine to run it?

<Snarls @ IBM and hp> See, it's not just me asking!

We have about two-dozen old DL320s with Celerons which have been re-used already about three times, they're currently running Red Hat with only 768MB of RAM each for some low-power webapps. I'd love to migrate the lot onto blades but the savings just don't add up to the hassle yet, even if we used VMware. Two separate blade chassis (for redundancy) with a dozen Atom CPUs in each would do nicely, please!