I Don't See Any...
...space for the waterfall.
The Custom Engineering unit of supercomputer maker Cray and the bespoke ruggedized, military-grade system maker Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) have joined forces to prototype a super-dense microserver based on Intel's mobile Core i7 processors. Last week, X-ES announced that it had won the contract to develop and …
Obviously military. It looks small enough to fit into back pack. Perhaps, after all the 'hacking' scandals, this the kind of heavy iron needed to encrypt/decrypt millitay radio traffic in the field. Perhaps it is part of the new 'networked soldier' strategy where every man in the field will have his own website and micro-blog.
Just got to develop personal fusion generators to power the things.
Nah. The soldier wouldn't have any room left in his backpack for the 1300W PSU, and he'd have to lug one heck of a lot of cable around to use it in the field.
I'm guessing this is M$'s next gen cloud service server, and I think they are simply doing their own design much in the way Google do their own "baking tray" servers. Any "military" users are more likely to be people like the NSA or CIA, which need lots of grunt for large front-end server farms used for churning through the immense databases they have, and for real-time analysis of vid feeds and telecoms the World over.
Interesting to see they went for mobile chips, I was expecting maybe an Atom-based design with even greater density and low power.
Couple of things strike me about this board
A) Core i7 doesn't have ECC controller in the cpu package so presumably they are using a custom chip set which adds ECC support but no doubt reduces memory throughput being outside the die
B) Why havnt the staggered the boards to minimize heat shadowing, probably says something about the intended form factor
All in all has the hallmarks of a one off run and cray wished to get some PR out of the extreme engineering