[Beowulf] 96 Processors Under Your Desktop (fwd from brian-slashdotnews at hyperreal.org)

[Jim Lux]

At 02:08 PM 8/30/2004 -0400, Russell Nordquist wrote:
>I find two things interesting. 1) The top brass at Orion are from
>Transmeta 2) This is not shared memory setup, but ethernet connected. So
>latency will be an issue....
>
>Does anyone have any idea haw the Efficeon's stack up against Opterons?
>A quad cpu opteron comes in at a similar price as Orion's 12 cpu unit,
>but the opeteon is a faster chips and has shared mem. The Orion DT-12
>lists a 16 Gflop linpack. Does anyone have quad Opteron linpack results?
>russell

More to the point, given the market that Orion is selling into (offices), 
what's the power consumption and noise level of the quad opteron?  If Orion 
has 96 processors and you use your 4 Opteron/12 Efficeon ratio, that's like 
32 opterons (i.e. 8 quads).  If opterons are 100W each, that's 3200W, which 
is quite a bit more than the 1500-1800W the Orion box is shooting for.




James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Telecommunications Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875