Could a gigaflop laptop be under the xmas tree for you next year?

Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer (Technology 2:00 a.m. PDT)

A small chip-design company is unveiling a new processor it says will
bring supercomputer performance to desktops and laptops within a year.
Imagine running an Earth Simulator on a notebook. By Leander Kahney.

This is my favourite recent computer technology story. Score one to the lateral thinkers :D

[img]graemlins/crying.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/1drool.gif[/img] all I need to say about either one

I think we'll see more gradual increases in processing power first -- less radical changes means less R&D time & money. I think Sun Microsystems has a good idea HERE since they're using existing technology.

"By placing the chips edge to edge, directly touching, so data can flow freely, Sun has taken out the need for the tiny wires, pads and solder points that now connect chips on printed circuit boards that help make up computer systems, Sun said.
The breakthrough could mean sending data among chips up to 100 times faster than current top transmission rates on traditional semiconductor-chip interconnects, Sun said. "

That's pretty cool. Actually the G5 uses a version of the chip that my article talks about. The big difference is the G5 one has 4 pipes and the new version has 64! Plus they already have the tech to scale that up to 128 then 256 pipes.

haha this one is funny, finally a good use for PS2's [img]tongue.gif[/img]

PlayStation turns supercomputer

Soon supercomputers could be made out of Sony PlayStation 2 game consoles.

Scientists at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications, (NCSA) have linked together 70 PlayStation 2s to find out how good they are at crunching numbers.

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LoL! Check out this what this dolt's saying:
"It is capable of 17.6 trillion floating point operations per second, with a combined storage capacity of 176 terabytes.

"Each individual G5 is a dual processor, 2GHZ machine with 4GB of memory. So it's extremely fast!"

Oh really? :D
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