[Beowulf] commercial clusters

[Joe Landman]

Douglas Eadline wrote:

> Are you saying:  At least 100,000 chess computers were sold for an
> average of $6000 (US) for a total of $600,000,000 before the PC was
> introduced. Almost a billion dollar chess computer market segment.
> You are right, that is a hard fact to believe.

[tongue firmly placed in cheek]

What?  You haven't seen the IDC report on the chess computer market?

[humor mode off]

Of course this could be just like the music markets here in the US
where, once the data was being accurately tabulated, it was discovered
that the most popular music wasn't quite what the exec's thought it was ...

If there is a $0.6B chess market, I will admit surprise.  I wouldn't be
surprised in the least if the "gamer" market were that large or larger.
 But not likely at $6,000USD/person.  More likely under
$1,000USD/person, with several million (10's or even hundreds?)

When you think about that, and realize that this is where the Cell is
targeted, you start to appreciate that the gamers will keep the cost of
this chip down.  This in turn will let us do some neat things with it,
provided neat things can be done with it ...

Reminds me of an old saturday night live skit.  "It's a dessert
topping!" "It's a floor wax!", "no, it's both!".  In our case "It's a
gamer console chip!", "It's an HPC chip!", "no, it's both!".

Joe

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax  : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615