Newsgroups: comp.parallel From: Glen Clark Subject: Good news for Beowulf Organization: Clark Communications Date: 21 Apr 1997 12:48:33 GMT Message-ID: <5jfnn1$7t6@server1.ctc.com> I know Gene doesn't consider the Beowulf a true "super", but I though the following might be of tangential interest to the group. With no local disk and an off-brand clone box, the cost of the CPU is usually about 50% of the cost of a Beowulf node. That means the system cost is very tied to the cost of the chip. Get as good a deal on the motherboard and other items as you can, there's a price floor you cannot go through. And as long as Intel held the line on the price of silicon, there was (unless you made a MIPS, Alpha or PowerPC Beowulf) not much else you could do. A cover story on this week's Electronic Engineering Times describes the arrival of quantity delievry of AMD's K6 and it's effect on the market. While EET usually seems (IMHO) to have a pro-Intel spin, they painted a dark picture for the future of the K6 and AMD. In addition to the inevitable scorched-earth price reduction from Intel which most anticipate, EET says they will also collide with the soon-to-be-release latest offering from Cyrix. As the new entries scramble for market share in the market for N-1 generation technology and Intel tries to drown them, a real price war is anticipated. In a remarkably similar story on CNN this weekend, CNN put some speculative dimension on the price reduction. Citing Intel's usual 10-15% price reduction at similar times in the past, CNN speculated Intel would double that, meaning Intel unit prices could fall as much as 30% within the next two weeks. That would be a 15% price reduction in the cost of a Beowulf node by the end of the month. And even if you don't like Intel silicon, (IMHO) Alpha and the R10000 will have to react to get their flops/dollar ratios back in line. Seems like good news all around for people with problems having coarse- or medium-grained parallelism. -- Glen Clark glen@clarkcom.com State College, PA -- Articles to parallel@ctc.com (Administrative: bigrigg@ctc.com) Archive: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/internet/usenet/comp.parallel