CNN heeft best wel kewl news over een of andere super computer die 60.000 maal zo snel is als een 350MHz PII, en dat voor 1000 dollar!
Within 18 months, you may be able to put the equivalent of today's supercomputer on your desktop--for about $1000. The CPU, long the heart of all PCs, may be an unnecessary component in tomorrow's high-performance computers.The new computer will be able to process 100 billion instructions per second, according to Kent Gilson, chief technical officer of Star Bridge Systems. Company representatives discussed their plans for a high-end PC this week while announcing HAL-300GrW1, a "hypercomputer" that is said to be 60,000 times as fast as a 350-MHz Pentium, and many times as fast as IBM's supercomputer Pacific Blue. (The test used to measure the HAL's performance was different from the measure used for Pacific Blue, so exact comparisons are difficult.)
The new $1000 computer will be "three orders of magnitude different in price-performance [ratio]" from today's PCs, Gilson claims. It will fill many of the roles of a supercomputer, such as voice recognition, natural language processing, and holographic displays, he says. What's more, Gilson says, this super-PC will "run PC applications in emulation mode, in a manner similar to how the DEC Alpha runs NT, but it will run it a lot faster."
