[Dogma]

So go on, what are the fastest computers you can buy these days.

My money is on the SGI machines - which although most people couldn't really justify buying them - they are still technically within your reach if you really wanted.

However - how many dual 800s would overthrow it in terms of pure processing power (let alone Athlons).

But that's really beside the point. We're talking individual systems here. There's no point in having 10 Micras when you need a Lamborghini.

Just to see where we are in terms of technology.

How cool would this be.

SGI reality room

Let's face it, the more power we get, the cooler the graphics look. How about using some of this graphic processing technology for some actual data processing. It's all calculations anyway - especially with the amount of polygons these buggers can shift per second, there's some serious maths at work here.

[seanyepez]

I prefer to stay mainstream.

With a substantial amount of money, I would build a quiet, water-cooled Athlon MP rig with excessive amounts of RAM and a large storage array.

[rambo47]

IBM Power4? You could even run Unix on it, no?

[Cipher13]

When it becomes an option, without a doubt, the Power4.

Why no MP rigs? 10 Micras versus a Diablo isn't the same as 10 G4's versus a Power3...

[Dogma]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
<STRONG>When it becomes an option, without a doubt, the Power4.

Why no MP rigs? 10 Micras versus a Diablo isn't the same as 10 G4's versus a Power3...</STRONG>

Just a silly rule i made up for this. I figure that most people won't want to have lots of machines running a processing farm.

Yes, I would probably like to have about 10 MP G4s, 10 MP athlons, and a couple of SGi's, but space is a consideration. (let alone insane costs!)

Does anyone know any benchmarks for the Power4 and the cost of one ? (including the Motherboard etc, you will need to have to support it.)

Hey, I'm not gonna be buying any of these, but we should well take heart from the level of power from the top notch stuff now, as we'll get our hands on those kind of speeds in a few years.

What would you use it for?

(I'm hoping that eventually the system bus etc will catch up with the processor speed, i.e no bottleneck at all. Imagine having 512Mb of full speed on-chip cache memory (overkill?), System software booted from RAM (or solid state equivalent), Smart Media arrays instead of Hard Drives - that sort of stuff.)

Anything that'll be less prone to mechanical failure, anything that makes the whole thing more reliable. How about an inbuilt UPS (Lithium polymer of course) , that'll keep the machine going for 5 minutes if the power fails and will automatically save and shutdown all your data?

[garrettnelson]

Screw that ... buy a Cray.

[Ivan]

SGI, Cray....huh. If you want mean, raw computing power......read my sig. baby, so much power it are't to be illegal.