Tim Bray talks about the new Sun Niagara chips, and the systems that will use them. It's a cool sounding technology, and I followed this link to a performance page on it, which raised a question in my mind. All things considered, the new system wasn't that much faster than the 3.6 Ghz Dell system at the bottom end. Especially when you consider that a lot of web applications can scale by throwing more hardware at them - the big question is this: What's the cost of the new SunFire systems, quantity one, versus the cost of 2-3 commodity intel boxes. Given the simple scale savings intel gets from their volume, it's going to be hard for Sun to compete there. I'll give them credit for being aggressive - this is neat stuff. It's an open question how well it will sell.