Xbox clusters?

[Velocet]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 02:04:55PM -0500, Velocet's all...
> On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 12:50:46PM -0500, Josip Loncaric's all...
> > Microsoft's Xbox packages a 733 MHz Pentium III, 64 megabytes of memory,
> > a DVD drive, 100 Mbps Ethernet, and an 8-gigabyte hard disk for about
> > $300.  This would make it a reasonably powerful cluster node with an
> > excellent price/performance ratio.  Of course, the thing runs a
> > slimmed-down variant of Windows 2000 instead of Linux, but has anyone
> > discussed making an Xbox cluster?
> 
> Why bother when for about $300 USD you can put together a
> cluster node with a 1.333GHz athlon with 256Mb of DDR ram?
> 
> Sides, who brought 'price/performance' onto this list? Dont know thats never a
> factor on the beowulf list? :)

So, the question is, with these numbers, how do people end up spending
$250K on 40 or even 60-CPU clusters?

/kc