VectorWise has emerged from stealth mode. Even more interesting is that Ingres is collaborating with them on Ingres VectorWise. And most interesting is the video made to promote the work. In the interest of disclosure, I have friends who work on this at Ingres and VectorWise.

I have read many of the papers on X100 and MonetDB and believe the performance claims they make. Within the MySQL community, this is most similar to Kickfire in terms of the query workloads it can support. The difference is that VectorWise writes their software to run at full speed on a modern CPU and maintain a high IPC rate while Kickfire uses custom hardware (and a lot of really good software that they probably cannot describe without an NDA). Anyone attempting to build a VectorWise storage engine would have to do all of the fun things that KickFire has done to circumvent much of the MySQL optimizer and execution code, so I doubt that will be repeated.