Frankly with the Niagra out there, this seems partially redundant.  Then again, making I/O tasks, essentially a chain of closures, into reasonable threads is a pretty bad waste by itself...<p>Yup these atoms are essentially I/O processors, just running enough buffer cache management, filesystem, and driver code required to keep other components (network and disk) at high utilization.<p>The benefit for atoms here is the short latency.  They have short pipelines (better for the little actual computation required for I/O driving), and there are presumably more cores available here than the equivalent Xeon system (reducing queuing delays).