Turn that PC into a Supercomputer

[Coroner]

A small chip-design firm will unveil a new processor Tuesday it says will transform ordinary desktop PCs and laptops into supercomputers.
The new chip is a parallel processor capable of performing 25 billion floating-point operations per second, or 25 gigaflops.
An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards, each containing four of the chips, would perform at about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).
At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. -- Wired News
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60791,00.html


Sounds sweet to me.
I need a new tower.

 

[ekÆsine]

sure let me just withdraw 25 grand from my bank account...

having all those processor in a single computer would introduce a single point of failure not to mention there goes half a year or more of your paycheck.

you cannot seriously fit all that into a notebook. i mean you would have to cool that sucker with liquid nitrogen and work out at a gym 24/7 to be able to carry the 100 pound mini nuclear reactor pack to power that sucker.

seriously though this sounds like a pipe dream, a small company nobody has ever heard of, making something that is impossible with the current technology thats available now. by the time they come out with this, the pentium 10 will be on the market by then.

plus what will this do to that theory that computer speed doubles every 2 years? (or am i thinking of something else?)

i would bet that there is zero to no chance in hell this project will get anything more than gossip and giggles.

 

[tech4hire]

too funny, lots of giggles here ekÆsine

 

[chalk]

hehe

 

[zoerb]

pci would be way too slow

 

[g5orbust]

Sounds like an awesome technology that is not as farfetched as it sounds, though Im sure, since PCI's shared 1.3GBps bandwidth is too slow for this type of work, that theyre talking about the evolution of PCI, currently PCI-X, which will eventually upgrade into PCI EXpress that will top out at around 10GBps, well within th boundaries of a float co proc.

anyways, found something interesting:

Note: Folding anyone?

 

[Makaveli_786]

Last year in a join collaboration Sony, Toshiba and IBM made something known as "the cell", this is a michrochip capable of running at one teraflop with 250 GHz behind it... Forget all youve heard the future is coming and its coming first... considering they fitted this into a tiny micro-chip doesnt make the supercomputer look like its anything special.. If you think this kind of technology is way too advanced you need to look up nano-tech bro!

 

[g5orbust]

Last year in a join collaboration Sony, Toshiba and IBM made something known as "the cell", this is a michrochip capable of running at one teraflop with 250 GHz behind it... Forget all youve heard the future is coming and its coming first... considering they fitted this into a tiny micro-chip doesnt make the supercomputer look like its anything special.. If you think this kind of technology is way too advanced you need to look up nano-tech bro!

Cell chips are very real. Sony plans on using a version of the cell chip in the PS3 and already used the technology to combine the previously separate graphics and computational chips in the PS2 into one chip.

 

[Makaveli_786]

Cell chips are very real. Sony plans on using a version of the cell chip in the PS3 and already used the technology to combine the previously separate graphics and computational chips in the PS2 into one chip.

Actually Sony had no plans to produce cell chips till 2000 which makes it too late to put them into PS2.. the contract between IBM, Sony and Toshiba was signed in early 2001 I believe and January of this year Yellowstone(famous for their high-speed interfaces for connecting memory to microprocessors) and Rambus(famous for their extremely high power chip interfaces) have been signed onto the team by Toshiba and Sony.

Rambus's job is to produce interfaces powerful enough to smoothly tranport the data from one location to another and Yellowstone is working along the same lines. Theyll be working for faster broandband amongst other things... Damn I cant imagine the sheer power of the Playstation 3... Just blows my mind thinking about it.

 

[g5orbust]

Actually Sony had no plans to produce cell chips till 2000 which makes it too late to put them into PS2.

This combination of processors occured a few months ago in the PS2. The addition of an integrated RF reciever for the DVD player also happened during this very minor update.