disadvantages of a linux cluster

[Greg Lindahl]

> and if one could knock a few hundred
> off the price per blade, would come in at order of $1/MHz, very
> comparable to lintel.

I'm not sure if I like your math: As an example, look at the "blades"
from RackSaver (basically an ATX board mounted vertically). _List_ is
$119,000 for 132 AMD 1800+ cpus. So if you think that the AMD1800
really is about the same as a P4 1800, then that's $0.50/Mhz.
"order of" equal, but that's a significant difference.

But you are correct that work/watt or performance/watt isn't that
different in a blade system, because it's using basically the same cpu
technology. If you really want higher performance/watt, you need to
look at alternative technologies.

> One wonders why they can't sell the blades with 1.4 GHz PIII's?

Cooling, and $/cpu. If you look at all the blade offerings, you'll see
that the densest systems have the lowest performance cpus, and if you
want real P4's, you end up at 1/4 the density of the slow PIII blades.

You also pay a lot extra for that last little bump in in Mhz; I haven't
looked at the details of PIII pricing recently, but it might be that the
1.4 Ghz cpu is a lot more than the next lower speed grade.

-- greg