Intel Corp (INTC)

[wbmw]

Is it REALLY so far-fetched to imagine Google creating a highly customized and cost-reduced server board, where they control the design and manufacture of every component that isn't already cut-throat-commoditized?

The desire to do so isn't at all far fetched. The capability of doing so is where people here are skeptical. From a pure business decision, Google or Facebook would not be so dogmatic to use their own processors, if their servers ran slower than on a Xeon system. The ONLY reason to use a non-x86 part is if it really can run the workloads faster - and that is easier said (or easier to blog about) than done.