Change the branding to Supermicro and cut the cost to $5,000 and suddenly, many dedicated host providers out there have these servers. We're probably only 2-3 years away from this core count being a $2,000-$3,000 box. Throw ARM and Tilera architecture and whatever AMD is doing with the acquisition of SeaMicro in there and it might even accelerate that pace.

Not everybody buys HP... A 1U Supermicro 4-socket 64-core Opteron server with 32GB RAM costs $3850.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239...

Since databases are the bottleneck in a lot of apps, it makes a lot of sense to spend a ton of money on them. $10k will cover roughly the monthly wage of a good DBA. It won't cover anywhere near the costs of getting a software team to optimize everything for "web scale performance". The only reason you wouldn't want a 64 core machine is that Oracle will try to charge per core, so a machine with less cores and better per-core performance might be more cost effective.