Maybe the best bet for fending off our impending submersion is to work out how to hook up 45 mouse brains and let the US war-machine run their nuke sims on those instead of ploughing 3MW of (no doubt) coal-fired leccy into their CGI death sims.

Does it have a PCI-X slot for a graphics card?

Bet Vista still struggles on this rig.....

Pretty smart frikkin mice then.

Can it run Elite

"we calculate that one Roadrunner is approximately as intelligent as 45 mice"

Or 450 project managers ...

Does this mean that AMDs touted (elsewhere here) "Cell bad, ATI GPUs good" strategy for Opteron-based superdupercomputers has just been strangled at birth?

I'm way more worried about the prospect of the good ol' US of A maintaining out-of-date nukes for readiness, than a piddling little 3 MW of power consumption.

The lead-lined, full length one.

I'm curious how long it takes to crunch a Seti@Home packet...

Still not enough for the recently annouced Crysis sequel.

> Does it have a PCI-X slot for a graphics card?

No, it's already got nVidia on the motherboard, as evidenced by the 3 megawatt power requirement.

Read this and tried installing vista in my pet mouse. It died as a result, so no change there.

With the power of a cats brain.

Mines the one with the Tom 'n' Jerry Cat Converto Betamax in the pocket.

Steven R

If those are pan-dimensional white mice, as encountered by Arthur Dent, then I'm impressed. If they're ordinary house mice, then Roadrunner is about as clever as my cat...

(PH, as I'd like to know where she features on this scale)

It's a lot of money to prove that something theoretically still works or doesn't. I mean, it's not as if you can get the parts anymore...

Still, I suppose it's better that boys play with toy cars rather than try to play with the traffic on the M1.

[...] They need all that power to check if a nuke is stale or fresh. Isn't there a boffin with a Geiger counter and a slide rule who could figure that one out? I mean if it's 10 megatons or 9.7 it isn't that important. [...]

It's a bit more complex than that. The "buildz yr ownz nuke!!1!" plans on teh intarwebs give the impression that nuclear weapons are quite simple beasts but today they have evolved in to startlingly complex things; following both the "maximum bang for minimum material (weight)" and "maximum bang for added complexity of <foo>" principles.

An example would be the enhanced yeild tricks fission->fusion->fission types where tritium is injected in to the heart of the fission reaction at /just/ the right moment to yeild a fusion reaction which, in turn, dumps enough neutrons out in to a third stage fission explosive - the whole thing timed just right so that first explosion hasn't reached (and destroyed) that final stage.

The age of the weapon isn't necessarily going to decrease it's yeild (although it might) it may be that it fizzles completely, explodes prematurely and therefore has a low yeild, or (worse of all possible worlds) has it's components mature (decay) in to products which are unstable or start to emit lethal levels of neutrons when brought close to each other.

The boffin with the slide rule would be able to say "yep, there is something in there which is radioactive" but little beyond that.

Personally, unpleasant though this subject is, I'd have preferred if the Reliable Replacement Warhead project had got approval. Dial-a-yeild, safe to handle and long lived.

My mouse has a brain? 1/45th of a petaflop just to move a cursor around the screen? And 45 x £9 costs ... err I'll ask my mouse shall I?

PH, cos mouse-level IQs fascinate me

"Personally, unpleasant though this subject is, I'd have preferred if the Reliable Replacement Warhead project had got approval. Dial-a-yeild [sic], safe to handle and long lived."

Wouldn't that violate the NPT?

Just get rid of the weapons and use the petaflop to search for better cancer drugs.

RE: RE: "Does it have a PCI-X slot for a graphics card?"

Some people are soooooooo picky, gramatically and technically it's a fine thing to say as PCI-X is backwardly compatible, I have a PCI graphics card in one of my PCI-X slots on my ESX server (water cooled dual xeon btw), therefore, maybe no mistake made.

The fact that 64bit features of PCI-X didn't really take off explains the common re-usage of the acronym for PCI eXtended, and even manufacturers, retailers etc. use it, given the way that language works (missuse of words being accepted as the norm, therefore become correct), it may be technically incorrect, but it is accepted, (by all but pedants like yourself, I bet you complain about misuse of the word "decimated" as well).

<flame>

It was a vaguely funny thing to say, and you either missed the fact that it was a joke or thought that your piffling bit of trivia might actually be important to anyone else but you, the fact that it bugs the hell out of you is the only reason I replied, don't reply or I will taunt you some more.

</flame>

I think AMD would argue that they could, if given the chance, build the same size machine that would perform better on less power. Of course, you'd need to build the beast to prove/disprove their point.

The cell architecture is interesting.

Some friends at IBM did an Informix port to Sony's cell based PS3. (Ok, someone had too much free time on their hands,,,) Somehow I don't think you *can* do this to a GPU.

So I'd say AMD's calling for the Cell's death a tad premature.

The penguin... because I believe they also ported Linux to the PS3 too. ;-)

Perhaps they are pre-ocupied with mental climate modelling and not looking where they are going?

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

I wonder what that would look like if that was opened?

Bates Gill talks about the necessity of disarmament. I am not shitting you, it's the very Gill Bates and he's a fellow interested in peace and free chewing gum for everybody.

If you wan t to look it up yourself, the following might help: 'Es gebe einen zunehmenden Konsens, dass ernsthafte und wirksame Abrüstungsschritte notwendig seien, erklärte Sipri-Direktor Bates Gill.'

Actually the 64-bit'ishness of the parallel PCI interface was introduced with the PCI spec rev. 2.something. PCI-X's main claim to fame over the original PCI was the increase of the bus clock from 33/66MHz (66MHz introduced with PCI rev. 2.1) to 133MHz (PCI-X rev. 1.0) or even 266/533MHz (PCI-X rev. 2.0).

I'll get my coat, fast...

Made of only 50 000 cores, called Wile E Coyote?

NO It was the camels that were preoccupied with the quadratic equations. the mice are just in charge

"The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.* They are so much brighter that they soon realized that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottoms of ships or being patronized rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it."

* Never trust a species that grins all the time. It's up to something.

Well, since it's built with OPTERON chips, I doubt AMD has any complaints.

Re: China rumoured to be working on rival....

Fortunately, having named their computer "Coyote", it'll always blow up when it loses...

Re: @ The elephant in the room

...and they're telepathic, too; vis. "Homo Saps" by Eric Frank Russell, who warned us about them well before Mr. Pratchett caught on to their little tricks!

Surely that should be "meep, meep" ?

Or have I been hearing wrong for the last 40 years or more?

Just as well that Seagate wasn't behind this - or it would really be 0.91 petaflops...

It's the one with 24 buttons missing please

Don't be so unkind about China, it really is chicken.

Um, shouldn't that be Petaflops? Last time I checked, small 'p' was used for the prefix 'pico', as in "bloody small" (10 to the -12, IIRC). For example, capacitors rated at 10pF.

On the other hand, since the electronics/IT industriy seems to make a habit of "editing" values other fields have used for hundreds of years, maybe I shouldn't worry (it's fun watching mathematicians trying to figure how the old "Volts=Amps x Ohms" triangle (v=ir, i=v/r, r=v/i) works when they use "i" to mean "the square root of minus 1"...).

Any notice the NYT article goes ... petaflops, exaflops, yottaflops, xeraflops?

Someone trying to coin a new SI prefix xera-? At least the author didn't try "markofflops" or maybe megamurineflops (or mondokowflops...).

yes meep meep, twice PCI-X video error on POST ? :-P

Really if an IBM BIOS thats one beep two is a general POST error; (read the screen for the error code).

is that the IDE is really cheesy

</groan>

Hat, coat, and away

Get Madden '09 free....only catch is it installs a screen saver for the US government to use your PS3 when you are not....seems like a win/win for everyone.

Mr Mojo Risin