Goodbye to the days when supercomputers had to fill a room and welcome Asus, purveyor of all things Eee and its first ever supercomputer - the ESC 1000. Produced in conjunction with NVIDIA and the National Chiao Tung university in Taiwan, the desktop-sized machine is capable of speeds up to a mighty 1.1 teraflops, which may pale in comparison to the petaflop Roadrunner, but then so does the footprint.
The ESC 1000 houses a 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 processor and 960 graphics processing cores spread between Tesla c1060 processors and a Quadro FX5800, which require less electricity than microprocessors while offering higher speeds.
Backing up this smorgasbord of cutting edge micro-technology is 24GB of DDR3 1333Mhz RAM, an 1100 watt power supply and as if it would make a difference, a 500GB SATA II hard drive.
Though gamers may be salivating at its potential, it’s intended primarily for use with scientific research, image manipulation, engineering and medical purposes, and though prices are yet to be confirmed it’s expected to cost around US$14,519 to build.
Via GoodGearGuide.
The not-so-new ATI 4870 graphics card performs at up to 1.2 teraflops. My system itself contains 2 of the beasts so does that make my system more powerful or are we just talking about the amount of fresh technology here in terms of the microprocessors?