I'm looking forwards to an fanless agent station drawing less than 30 watts that we can plug in an LCD monitor and standard keyboard and mouse into.

We need about the power of an Atom chip and nothing more and it would save us big time on air conditioning. (Why are almost all foreign call centers in the tropics rather than say Iceland?)

The current slim clients are either too expensive, too wimpy or suck too much juice.

Embedded CPUs like this is TVs and monitors make a lot of sense to me to provide a simple web browser or MPEG2 player.

The silicon is going to be fairly cheap when there is already a power supply and case. WiFi chipsets will reach the stage where they are as cheap as the components for a wired ethernet port

With some open source apps to run on this (and to save cost and development time for the hardware manufacturers) they could become common.

If you just want a simple web browser you can get lots of low powered chips to ARM your system with. (Pun intended.)

The Atom's a gPhone level chip.

-HJC

ewwww thats a load of old cack which has many problems itself!

At least this ATOM is x86 based, and whats all this talk of open source software? Who the hell is going to use that?

The best thing about the Atom is that it doesn't waste power on calculations that won't actually be used.

That's also the worst thing about it.

So you need to choke this chicken full of threads that don't block each other.

Since every OS package reimplements the same wheels in different ways they don't fight over the same spinlocks.