[KaiserPro]

A few reasons:

1) They are based in france, near a source of cheap power.

2) They are not big fat Xeons, they are Xeon-Ds, which are a quarter as hot than a e5-26xx.

3) https://www.supermicro.nl/products/nfo/Xeon-D.cfm

you can fit 12 servers in 3u. Plus they are dirt cheap, I assume ~$400-600 a unit.

[stu2010]

Interesting. That's way cheaper than I was expecting, most higher than 4-core Xeon-D configurations are more like $1000/node. I'm seeing a 24 node 3U server for $16k.

http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-multi-node-servers-micro...

[KaiserPro]

Yup, and thats the $lol price. You can expect that price to at least halve with volumes of 50+