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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (40202)	1/8/2001 3:26:36 PM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Charles, there are many items in a system that have bandwidth of some kind or another. That is why I asked you to quantify what bandwidth you were talking about. In absence of a clear reply, I assume you are referring to this from the link you gave me: "On a 64-CPU Sun HPC 10000 server, with a 10-Gbyte/s backplane, an aggregate 2.5 Gbyte/s bandwidth can be achieved." Now that's a pretty high spec machine and I don't have anything immediately to hand that matches it. But if you get yourself one of those Playstation 2 thingies, you will get about 20% of that. I hear that Saddam has managed to get his hands on an embargo busting shipment of PS2's with which to build a supercomputer to take over the world. Unlike some dotcom startup buyers who cant keep a business afloat, even with billions of other people's money and the best that Sun can give them, Saddam is a pretty shrewd guy. His 48 Playstation array will run rings round your 10000 in terms of "bandwidth". If we go for the mere 30 processor example from the sun link you quote, we find "On a 30-CPU Sun HPC 6000 server, with a 2.6-Gbyte/s backplane, this mean that a large "all-to-all" operation can run at about 650 Mbyte/s aggregate bandwidth". Again, I can only get about 60% of that with a $1000 dollar system based on an intel i840 system with 400Mbytes/sec (that's a dual Rambus channel yielding 3.2 Gb/s). But give me 9 months and I can sell you a single processor X-Box that will beat it for a couple of hundred dollars. Now be nice, and give me an example under $50,000 and i will see if I have any Windows CE devices about that can give it a good thrashing as far as "bandwidth" is concerned.