Xbox clusters?

[alvin]

"Robert G. Brown" wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Velocet wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> 
> Well, start with $300 rackmount cases (a rackmount case alone can easily
> cost more than an Xbox).  Add a high end P4 motherboard, the fastest
> P4-Xeon, and fully populate the MoBo with the biggest, most expensive
> RDRAM sticks you can find.  Get a big, fast SCSI drive and controller.
> Finish off with the fastest network you can arrange.

[snip]

> 
> This is the Lesson of the Wang.
> 
> (At least for those of you old enough to remember what one is...:-)

To put on my humrous hat.
I understand that MS is loosing cash on each Xbox they sell. Possibly
they are looking to do somthing like Kodak did in it early days where
they sold cameras much cheaper the it cost to produce them so that they
could make it up on the film. Well with the exception that MS want to
sell software.

Possibly we should everybody should go out an buy an Xbox. If we buy
enough then we may be able to put the EVIL EMPIRE out of business.

And If we all install Linux on the Xboxes then MS will lose out on the
ongoing SW sales.


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Alvin Starr                   ||   voice: (416)785-4051
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