Bambi-based Computing

I found this article in the Register very interesting but not as interesting as the paper it links to.

The concept of building balanced systems to improve efficiency and reducing TCO is one which is elegant and pleasing; I wonder if at times that we in the storage world could do better in this? The paper also points out one of the things that we are very aware of in storage; spinning rust has just not kept pace with the development of CPUs.

It also has a fact in that I was not aware of consciously, 2x2Gb DIMMs draw as much power as a 1 Terabyte disk. So simply chucking huge amount of memory in the form of cache will not solve all problems. I like the new measure that they come up with for measuring efficiency, Queries per Joule. Perhaps we could have a new SPC/TPC measure based on power efficiency.