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By lemonadesoda on 5/11/2006 9:54:39 AM , Rating: 2
and a single pentium 4 3.0GHz is approx = 3 to 4 teraflops.

Therefore a nest of 300, 100% efficient pentium 4 3.0Ghz would meet this calculation target. In practise, there is a lot of inefficiency in scheduling and this probably wouldn't match the 1 petaflop target. But the cost would be, say, 300 x $2000 = $600,000. Much less than $1M and nowhere near $90M.

BUT wait a minute , isn't the recently announced AGEIA PhysX supposed to be 100x as powerful as a pentium 4 3.0GHz at physics calculations? ie. One PhysX has been marketed to be (although on different calculation terms) circa 200-400 teraflops.

That means I could build one Pentium 4 workstation board, with each PCI slot (ie 5 of them) filled with an AGEIA PhysX, and a nice GPU so demonstrate the "boom" in real time graphics.

Now that would cost me, (and being very generous with my budget), $2000 for workstation board CPUs RAID and HDD subsytem, $500 for GPU and 5 x $300 for PPU. All in $4000.

The net rip-off to the US taxpayer = $90,000,000 - $4000 = $89,996,000.

Someone please tell me where I got my math wrong. Thanks!












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