Microsoft has from the beginning made clear its interest in supporting all major server workloads on Windows Azure.

These benchmarks run a variety of server workloads (OLAP and OLTP type databases, dynamic Web applications, groupware) in a number of virtual machines.

There were no such disasters when looking at server workloads.

Much as expected, thread-heavy server workloads fare a lot better, with Interlagos matching or beating Magny-Cours almost across the board (though AnandTech did find a couple of exceptions).

But the new Drive Extender was intended for more than just Windows Home Server: its design and features were believed to be good enough for real server workloads.

Right now, SeaMicro only offers a product based on Atom, which the company claims is head-and-shoulders above the dual-core ARM A9 parts it tested in performance per watt on server workloads.

In my experience IOPS are the least understood and most relevant performance bottleneck for server workloads.

At the high end, there are server workloads for which SLC SSDs are the only viable alternative to serving from RAM.

Sun designed the chip this way because server workloads usually have high re-utilization in data and instruction across processes and threads but low number of floating-point operations in general.

Hope still persisted, however, that the processor's architecture might fare better when tasked with server workloads.