[pling]

I want option 3. A 4U rack with 32 completely isolated embedded stand alone quad core ARM or PPC systems, a network switch and an FPGA on each connected to the switch fabric.

Then we can start doing some interesting stuff past finding new ways to chop computers up.

[jacquesm]

Very interesting, that would be something I'd buy just to mess around with, I can think of a few ways in which I'd use it right off the bat and if you give me couple of hours more I'll have a whole raft of them :)

[fanf2]

That does not sound very high density compared to what you can get from a company like Baserock - http://www.baserock.com/servers

[pling]

I want a hefty FPGA attached to the CPU bus and switch backplane. That will take a lot more power than the ARM core.

[wooger]

32 ARM chips in 4U seems very low to me, just in terms of the TDP a 4U rack is able to dissipate at present. You could increase density a lot.

[pling]

You could but I want standard storage per node (PCI-E FLASH), redundant PSUs and the TDP of a hefty FPGA going flat out is a lot larger than that of the ARM core.