64 Cores, 4 Terabytes

[Brent J. Craig]

How fast do you think this baby would render 4K?


Cray CX1 Wintel machine, starting at $25K. Available on Amazon!

Check it out:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/0...se-buyers.html

[Gunleik Groven]

I think this looks like a nice scratch box. especially with 8 quadro cards... :)

[David Birdy]

Nice ...very Nice....can I take it for a spin around the post house?

Dave

[Jason Ing]

Nice ...very Nice....can I take it for a spin around the post house?

Dave

Be careful, as you can clearly see, it has no seat belts.

[Wayne D]

just think......in 10 years time that will be a standard laptop!!!

[Gunleik Groven]

probably in 4...

[Bmoreshaun]

I might just have to get me one of those.....

[number6]

just think......in 10 years time that will be a standard laptop!!!

More like obsolete in two... IMO.

[Wayne D]

yes...........we have come a loooooooooong way

5MB Hard Disk in 1956 - Its a hard disk in 1956.... The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hehe... Interesting how it's carrying the Cray branding. And so will more future workstations like this. SGI (who purchased Cray Research some years back) is trying a new angle for their workstations. They're going for overloading cores and internal system bandwidth, essentially trying to squish a super computer into a desk-side enclosure. This is what SGI used to be good at and they're going back to their roots. But they're placing the Cray name on these new systems to differentiate from their Altix line that has been largely successful lately. Besides, I think the Cray name is still gold -- people think of Cray and think of massively powerful computers.

I'm looking into exact specs on this beast. I'm seriously interested as I'm getting ready to put together a new render farm. It's all about power per watt and how the ROI relates to the TCO and all those numbers. $25K seems quite reasonable if this system can provide the bandwidth to feed all those CPUs and their RAM. I think it can... If not, it will just be a marketing gimmick that will go nowhere. ...Now, I wonder what it will cost me to get Mental Ray render licenses for all those cores. Software companies better start rethinking their licensing strategies (render node software in particular) because mainstream systems with massive numbers of CPUs / cores are just around the corner.