[Beowulf] HP xw9300 end-of-life?

[Mark Hahn]

> We recently tried to order an xw9300, but our suppliers are telling us it is
> "end-of-life".
> This seems rather surprising, if true, given the good things I have heard about
> this model,
> and the fact that it is barely a year since it was released.

well, a year is a good long life for a computer.  and it's true 
that AMD is close to introducing a fairly significant new 
product (ddr2-supporting am2-socketed chips).  rumor says that 
these chips will support ddr2/800, which ought to be a noticable
improvement in bandwidth from ddr2/400.  

I'm personally hoping that AMD slips in some tweaks to the core, but I
suppose it's too much to hope that they'll double up the FP throughput
or 4-way instruction dispatch ;)

anyway, EOLing the ddr1 line seems a bit premature, but OTOH,
supporting just one memory type would be a big motivator to vendors...

regards, mark hahn.