HPC
Asustek opens curtain on desktop 'supercomputer'
Taiwanese motherboard and PC maker Asustek is apparently getting ready to jump into the personal supercomputer market with a glorified deskside supercomputer that it has developed in conjunction with graphics chip maker Nvidia and the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Asustek Computer, known by gearheads for its Asus …
Timing FAIL
Somebody should tell Asus that Vista has been superceded!
Thank you, El Reg
For calling "bullshit" on the performance numbers. Everyone else is trumpeting it as something Los Alamos would want for nuclear sims.
No good as a workstation
Since Excel is based on Double Precision data cells, we can say that that this would be a very poor choice for a traditional business workstation. Maybe ok for Word and Powerpoint.
When 234Gigflops inn't a supercomputer
We've come a very long way from the Cray 1.
1.1 teraflops
"the ESC1000 delivers 2.8 teraflops at single precision and 234 gigaflops at double precision"
You *could* get 1.1 teraflops by adding those two together and dividing by two...
I mean an average for that sort of thing would need to be skewed towards whichever it did more often, but a straightforward mean would give you the figure required.
errr.
You *could* get 1.1 teraflops by adding those two together and dividing by two...
by could, do you mean in another universe where 2 x 1.1 doesn't make 2.2?
Performance
It is extremely difficult to get 100% performance out of these devices. The Teraflop ratings they are given are for an ideal situation where the alu's are fully occupied across all threads and the max mem bandwith is being achieved.
The class of problems which can get you to this level of performance is rather small...
However for their available processing power they use a substantially lower amount of power than a cluster of cpu's, but are admittedly harder to program efficiently.
