Play with Playstations, Create a Supercomputer

Sony, IBM and Toshiba developed the Cel chip jointly and Sony went on to use them on the Playstation PS3. With a co-ordinating processor and eight execution units in each chip, the are actually well suited to churn things up a lot. Sony needed to process highspeed processing of hi-resolution of graphics. While doing so fortunately they left it as a open platform.

Now comes news that Gaurav Khanna, Professor of Astorphysics at the University of Mass. at Dartmouth put together eight of these machines and milking it for supercomputer performance; all for an investment of $4000 and some testing time. That really is good news for people looking for performance at a reasonable price!!

1 Gb RAMs become mainstream

512 Mb memory chips has been the mainstream component in use so long. By October however, the next leap seems to have happened. 1 Gbit chips have taken over. The hardware manufacturers made the switch in anticipation of Vista OS becoming catching up fast on popularity. Vista is memory hungry and the switch seemed logical.

There has been strange happenings however in the PC scene. Most PC manufacturers started pre-loading their machines with Vista soon after the release. However, soon news started trickling in that enterprises were pressing manufacturers to be able to switch to XP. Norm now has become that, XP disks that can be installed without getting back to MS for license keys are being shipped with systems. Most new purchase in the enterprise segment reportedly were falling back on XP.

Kind of strange!!