I'd wager that your sgi workstation drew considerably more than 10 watts though. That's why people get so excited about these things, that and the form factor.

The other thing is the hardware accelerated video decoding, watching 1080p h264 with just 10 watts is undeniably impressive.

EDIT: I have reason to believe the sgi pizzaboxes cost somewhat more than $74 as well, even 80s dollars.

It's not a battery-powered device. Why is 10 watts exciting except to people interested in power optimization?

Note that there are passively cooled (albeit larger: ITX) Cedar Trail boards available now for about 60% more (total system cost) which outperform this box by a factor of 8x or so, and consume about 30W peak. They have hardware accelerated video too (though the GPU acceleration requires proprietary 32-bit-only drivers).

Do you have link to the $120 Cedar Trail system you are speaking of?

Here's one (just the motherboard for $79US -- add a DIMM and some kind of storage, stick in a box):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0079VVLZG

I haven't bought one yet, but am eyeing them for my next gadget project. Intel has a family of boards in this price range.

The GMA3650 (aka PowerVR SGX545) graphics chipset used by Cedar Trail is not supported under Linux: http://communities.intel.com/message/158477

Not quite (this was discussed just yesterday). There's a framebuffer driver that works just fine. There's a binary GPU driver you can grab from the MeeGo archives which will run on current i686 distros. Graphics are about as well supported under linux (which is not to say "well") as this device is, which limits you to this "Puppy Linux" thing.

And of course for things that are not graphics, it's a PC, not a no-name ARM SoC. You can run RHEL or Ubuntu on it, plug in your favorite PCI card, etc...

But then there's the size...

The novelty is the size of these devices. I also run Word and Excel on a 386 at 40 Mhz but it was a full tower not a credit card sized box.

Agree. But we should then be saying "omg 1.5ghz full system in that form factor!" Not that such high spec system can run a sub average set of software intended for old 486

Btw, the pizza boxes were considered incredible small back in early 90s :)

The sgi Indy even had a "portable" version with attached lcd screen.

Yes the Indy was a very cool machine. There was also another one that was a cube... cannot remember what it was.

yes, 20 years ago nobody could've dreamed about that.

The excitement is more about being able to carry it in your pocket

...because many of them are probably too young to remember those ... other days:)