-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Daniel Pfenniger Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:43 PM To: Craig Tierney Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Vector coprocessors
Craig Tierney wrote: ... > > Do you have pricing on the Cell blades or co-processor boards? I doubt > they will be $8k, but I doubt they will be $100-$500. For the Cell my guess is that if it fits in a game station it cannot cost well over $500.- Last time I asked Clearspeed they would not disclose a price since the cards were not ready for shipping. Asking for a cost order of magnitude (will it be in the 1'000, 10'000, or 100'000 range?) somewhat below 10k appeared a reasonable estimate. For my applications this is not competitive with commodity multicore processors because I don't expect this card bringing more than a factor 2-3 speedup (not much of the code would use long vectors instructions). Dan _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf I would think that this is a misunderstanding here. You have two things going on with game console systems. First is a HUGE volume, The second is that oftentimes the consoles are sold at or BELOW cost, they make the money on the titles (much more than the systems). Which makes some sense when you think of it. If you have a game console, you have 5,10,15, or in most cases 25+ titles per game console. There is another thing here, the CPU (cell processor) available for commodity usage will probably NOT be the same as available for the game console. Add to that the cost of the system and components around the processor. I would suspect that blade modules with one cell would probably show up in the 3-4k range at start and eventually drop to 2500 or so. While Dual processor systems will probably have a premium of 1200-2000 on top of that. Then you must add the cost for the networking/power distribution shelves etc. I don't think that 6-8k is unrealistic for awhile. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
