'Personal supercomputer' goes on sale

[©opy®ight]

A personal computer that packs the processing punch of a miniature supercomputer has gone on sale in the US.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7340

[Egaladeist]

Hi CopyRight,


Well..I've got a few hundred covered...now...anyone care to donate the other $99, 500 ?

Eg

[Tim_axe]

Haha, the company that Transmetta is using to clear out their low-power processors. Well, at least the impressive thing is that there are 96 of them and the whole machine pulls under 15 amps on a 120v outlet. Works out to under 20 watts per processor, which is pretty good.


BTW, my personal workstation is supposed to pull off 7.6 gigaflops (according to SiSandra's Whetstone tests). And that is without SSE2 optimizations. Their 12 processor DT-12 pulls off a continuous 14 gigaflops, and 28 gigaflop peak with their Linpack version. (I haven't found a multi-processor version of Linpack to test my machine with, probably because they don't exist. But I also haven't managed to find a dedicated Linpack I could figure out how to run on my machine) If the scores I have are somewhere accurate, my dually rig isn't too far from being a super computer

And hey, it cost a lot less too.


For comparison, an 8x Dual-Core Opteron 875 system (16 processors total, clocking around 2.21GHz per processor) could pull off 78 gigaflops without SSE2 optimizations, and up to 96 gigaflops with some SSE2 code thrown in. (est. from SiSandra scores of Opteron 250 and a seperate benchmark I have of the 875 & Opteron 250 processors)

Though the parts are not avaliable to the public yet, I think it can be had for around $15,000 or so. You could run *nix on it, or shell out $$$$ to aquire Win 2003 Enterprise Server x64 edition (though unless you're DELL/HP, you can't buy it from MS). Might be cheaper than $100,000 too...