Look at this...

[dbc]

Wouldn't it be nice to have a couple of these in your folding farm...

probably cost you an arm and a leg though...

 

[Bodega]

then how would i heat my house?

 

[MN Scout]

Graphics processors might work just as well. Stanford is working on a program that will run Folding on your graphics card. I'd really like to get that loaded on my computer.

 

[BillR]

It does sort of make you wonder why that chip isn’t more widely used. Every major computer company IBM etc. all go for the mass CPU method. Hell, it can’t cost more then a Cray can it? Not to mention it should make a heck of a video card as well.

Just some silly questions

 

[Bodega]

in answer to your silly questions, maybe.

 

[mwarps]

If they'd design those puppies to run on PCI cards, I think we'd have a winner.

*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*

That's 300GFLOPS... equivalent to approximately 60 high end machines.

... if it works.

 

[Buckus]

They're probably going to cost more than, say, adding 5 new Athlon64 computers to your farm, but hey, they're low-power and they promise massive FLOPs, so we'll see when they come out.

 

[sharp]

wow. it is so amazing to me how quickly things change. 10 years ago, versus now, and then 10 years in the future....the knowledge gained is not linear. bloody near nothing is impossible given time and $$$. wOOt.

 

[ezee]

If they'd design those puppies to run on PCI cards, I think we'd have a winner.

*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*
*thunk*

That's 300GFLOPS... equivalent to approximately 60 high end machines.

... if it works.

They are, in fact, being designed as pci-x cards, with 4 chips on each pci-x board.

An earlier version was expected to sell for $12,000, including software porting costs, and $975 per chip in lots of 1000 for raw chips.

 

[relic]

Anyone old enough to remember the ISA quad i960 addin cards?
Same concept...custom port your program and add a lot of FLOPs to a standard PC.

 

[BillR]

I recall and addin for an old 386 I had, but I think it cost more then the computer it was supposed to be used in..

I did finally toss an ISA Hard drive Card though

 

[relic]

I recall and addin for an old 386 I had, but I think it cost more then the computer it was supposed to be used in..

Yeah, that was it. Expensive as hell, but damn sweet for crunching numbers,

 

[Chugiak]

I remember using a SKY (?) i860 board back in the last century (the year was 1991). I was processing ground penetrating radar data and the co-processor board shaved about two months off the processing time. Sure it cost $2,000 but it was worth it. Really. The processing software supported that one and only add-in board. It did kick some serious butt in the FLOPS department.

edit: whoops, wrong year

 

[unhappy_mage]

mwahaha, a hard card. we have an 80 meg version of that that's full length. it's awesome.

 

[rogue_jedi]

i remember seeing a hp server (still have one or two of the 1gb scsi drives from it ) that had an add in board that looked kind of like a pci card. on it was a socket for a 486/overdrive processor (anyone else remember overdrive chips? i never had one... but i wanted one)

i guess that was the original form of slocket cards??

of course, that was at a time when i had a text-only internet connection. we downloaded netscape 4.something (i think... or was it 3?) on it and it took all night, then the installer was broken. ah, those were the days. except not really. DSL is much more fun.


now if only they'd just make like a pci-e card that has a socket940 on it. easy multiprocessor systems! (once amd gets pci-e anyway...) and think of the savings. when your output gets too low, all you need is another of these cards and another opteron, and your output goes up (as long as you stay under 8/machine) much cheaper than buying a new mobo+proc+ram+psu+512k pci vid card+electric bill increase. i can't wait.