IMHO the future of computers wont be the speed of single chips, it will be the integration of arrays of processors.

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8qw.html

speaking of which im in the market to buy that board for my 3d work

it makes me feel like less of a man.

that, is a insane pc board... 4 dual core chips!? jesus....

/shrugs/ still be happier off with the big bad g5.

as for the above article, i'm glad we finally have the computers possible todo nuke testing in a computer... rather then in the environment... unfortunately we still had to let off a hundred or so previous to this point...

but, hopefully that'll be it.



[Edited on Oct 29, 2005 by zenFish]

I still need to get a PC that will run Doom3...

its actually 8 chips, if you install the optional daughter board you can have 8 dual cores, 16 chips.... at 2 ghz a chip that 32ghz worth of processing power

the computer itself would end up costing about $9000 + to support all 8 processors (this is using a minimal amount of ram)

Mobo- 1700
Processor (about $500) * 8 = 4000
Ram (about $400 per 2 gigs) * 8 = $3200

Not to mention the case, software, and misc stuff

[Edited on Oct 29, 2005 by ILikeBoobiestoo]

D-amn.

The sad part is, all I can think of for that amount of power... is hey, that probably would make for a really nice gaming rig.

You know, if I had 10k just lying about.

Or doing 3d work, i did a project for school that was 1200 frames long and it took nealry 30 minutes to render each frame, on that machine the whole thing would have only taken a few hours.

you could always just buy a bunch of cheap $200 computers and setup a render farm. Seems like it would cost a whole lot less then 10k if you did that.

That's exactly what IBM's Blue Gene/L, and every computer in the list, is. When IBM was first building the Blue Gene/L, one of the nodes alone ranked near the top of the list. The processors powering their computer are the same ones that will be in all of the major game consoles, as well as several other devices.

Not even, a $200 computer would barley be able to process the scene at all.

It would have to be a p4 or better, and it would need 2 gigs of ram at minimum.

You could get more speed out of multiple computers (they would cost more than $200 though) but it would be less usefull than the single computer.

Did they ever stop to think about what's going to happen when the computer they put in charge of our nukes becomes self-aware? Didn't any of them watch Terminator or War Games? Hell, things even went bad in Electric Dreams and all that computer was in charge of was the guys apartment.

Plus you'll have a bigger e-Penis.

writing the code required for a machine to become self aware would take years, if not decades. We dont even understand the human mind completley, let alone recreate it.

You don't write the code for that. The machine is so powerful it does it itself. And by the time the scientists realise what's happened, it's already too late. They'll barely have time to lament their wasted lives before the machine unleashes it's robot army and kills them.

And since you mention it, even the living super-computer won't be able to understand the complexities of the human mind. That's why it wants to destroy all living beings. The joke's on Blue Gene though, because no matter how hard it tries it'll never understand the human emotion called love. That will be it's greatest failure.

dont write code? im sorry you will have to explain to me how you program an AI without code... that one is beyond me