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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

64 Cores, 4 Terabytes

B

Brent J. Craig

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

cx1_photo.jpg

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

Check it out:
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/impulse-buyers.html
 
Nice ...very Nice....can I take it for a spin around the post house?

Dave
 
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.
 
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.
 
I wonder if these muscle machines aren't like the Hummers that were once the darlings of pouer-loving soccer moms? And i wonder if GPUs aren't the new energy efficient Volts of the near future? It seems to me it should only take a few CPU cores in a computer to do the image manipulation required to prepare it for rendering, then you turn that tedious job over to GPUs.

I see this changeover has already begun in many apps and can be easily made the standard by software companies by making some code changes.

It's not quite like the Hydrogen conundrum where you can't get the public to buy a hydrogen car until the refueling infrastructure is in place, and you can't get the refueling infrastructure to be funded until automobile manufacturers make the cars.

But my understanding is that REDCINE is more GPU based than CPU, and a company like Cineform can seemingly turn its attention on a dime and produce a new paradigm while others are just talking about it. So they could easily make a GPU centric computer sing using their software. Other companies as well.

I'm just thinking that somebody is going to take advantage of the pouer of the GPU and make computer towers just the mechanism for holding the interchangeable GPUs, and thus making the processors and the rest of the hardware have a much longer off-the-shelf-life while still functioning productively. Need more pouer? Change or add a GPU.

Many may hold a different view.
 
Add an array of graphics cards to that thing and you could predict the weather.:)
 
I'll wait for the Mac version, thank you, which I would guess is just around the corner.

Stephen
 
Before too long there won't be a 'Hackintosh'

There will be 'you got OSX on there yet?'
 
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