Your assumption is where the calculation goes off. AMD is releasing a "Fusion" E-350 chip which puts the CPU and GPU on the same chip, and which uses low power (18W), so you can put a bunch of them in a server box:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-fusion-brazos-zacate,2786-4.html Early performance tests on games shows each chip is powerful enough to run an instance of SL. Assuming you store all the assets for a number of sims locally on the server, they should run pretty fast, without needing to fetch and decode. A room full of servers still isn't free though, and the company hosting this beta charges $0.02 per user-hour. That is a manageable cost even if fully passed on to residents and they use SL a lot. 10 hours a day would come to $6 a month. ---------ORIGINAL MESSAGE---------- Message: 9 Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 02:58:51 -0800 From: Stickman<stick...@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [opensource-dev] SL Browsification Conventional experience tells me that the SL viewer resource usage consumes one CPU core and one GPU... Assuming a lack of specialized GPU ... _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges