It's a footnote to the larger thing, but it mentions "compression and crypto co-processors". I'm familiar with hardware crypto acceleration, but I'm sort of curious about the compression part--is it gzip or one of the fast algos like Snappy/LZO/LZ4 or something proprietary? How fast?
Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with (perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.
Of course they'll tend to pick cases where it helps a lot, but they claimed 50% wall time and 25% power savings on a Hadoop job, and they emulate the zlib API.
If I'm reading right this was with a Sandy Bridge-based Xeon; time saved by the coprocessor could be greater when the CPU is slower.
Its a dev board; not really something you'd use in production. Its a small run of reference hardware for devs to get started on; by the time its ready for release OEM's will have much more affordable kit for end users to buy.
That's my point of comparison. Best case, if Seattle can be slightly faster than Avoton with better I/O and the customers get high on ARM hype, AMD could charge at most the same price as Avoton. Most likely it will be cheaper.
Besides compressing network traffic, hardware compression could be interesting for applications like zram--somewhat expands what you can store in RAM with (perhaps surprisingly?) less random page-read latency than even an SSD.