HappySqurriel said:
If the Cell was more powerful that 2 Xeon processors why are companies willing to spend multiple times the price of a PS3 to buy a Xeon processor to run linux? My question was that the cost for a researcher shouldn't be that major of a concern being that he could have (probably) found several researchers who were looking for a very powerful system, and he could have leased the hardware at a fraction of the cost of buying it. |
Why are people willing to buy a Blade server with a Cell CPU for many times the cost of a PS3? The answer is of course flexibility, you can load up a Blade server with several GB of RAM and dual Cells. Still, if your work doesn't require loads of memory but does require loads of horsepower, a PS3 cluster is extremely cost effective. The PS3 that I wrote my matrix multiply on for school was in a cluster of 24 PS3s at Virginia Tech's corporate research lab. They're researching cost-effective supercomputing from both a price-of-hardware perspective and a cost-to-operate perspective (lowering the power bill). It's a pretty good deal, since Sony sells these things at a loss, whereas IBM sells them at huge profit margins.
