The graphics processor almost won’t be used, but is important because it means that it doesn’t need to be included on the mobo (hence lowering system power consumption).

The power gating in the CPU cores is also important, because in this system, low idle power is critical.

The big seller of AMD over Intel (and worth hyping to the max in your advertising) is that AMD doesn’t seek to use ECC memory as a price differentiator (Intel restricts it to Xeons, and low power, low cost Xeons are non-existent).

ECC is necessary to have reliability (and reliability of any data that is written, even using ZFS) in a system with modern amounts of RAM and on 24/7/365.

Such a system should also have 7+ SATA ports. Consider, if you build a NAS, you will probably want to dedicate an additional 2 drives for redundancy in a RAID 5 setup. You also want to include a SATA port for a DVD ROM drive, even if it is removed after install. And some people will want to run SSDs, even SSD mirrors for the OS drive as costs continue to drop.

This means that with 2 drives for redundancy, a mirrored OS drive, and an optical drive there are 5 SATA ports in use before we even get to data drives (which is the raison detre for a NAS). So it is very conceivable that 10 port SATA motherboards will be useful and sought after for such a system.

USB3 is also a necessity, as it makes sense to backup that system to another RAID5 system (e.g. using USB3 HDD docks) and this is the easiest way to do it.

The reason why this will sell is because the media collections people have accumulated demand this sort of setup, and until now there has been no system of this sort available with low idle power and low price. Old computers can’t substitute for this because they don’t have low idle power. So effectively AMD has a monopoly over this untapped market until Intel decide to get in on it, which they don’t really want to do as they don’t want to undercut their own server product.

Anyway, it would be nice to get a teaser of the idle power (without HDDs), price and release date of the Llano processor system suiting the sort of system I have outlined above. Remember, you need the lowest power Llano at a lowish price, and that it uses ECC RAM.

In France, the use phase account for only 42% of CO2 emissions and fabrication for 58%

http://www.greenit.fr