Friday, September 16, 2005
dual dual
I was at work this afternoon, just kind of a lazy day finishing up some projects for the week. Not much exciting was happening, until a delivery guy came with a big box with that infamous crooked E on the side. You know the one. A big box from dell.
He said it was for a staff person who I knew worked next door to me in the 3d lab, so I pointed him in the right direction, but then out of sheer curiosity, I followed him into the room. The staff person wasn't there, but a friend of mine was, so he signed for it. We both looked at it, and decided it was a shame to let whatever it was sit in the box, so we opened the box to find a fairly nondescript computer from Dell. We opened the computer and saw this:
The image quality is bad, but you get the idea. My friend took out the fact sheet from the box and read: "Two dual core 2.8Ghz Intel Xeon processors, 6 gigs of RAM, 1 Terabyte of SATA hard drive storage in a RAID array..."
You get the idea. This computer - one box running one OS - is theoretically capable of over 11 Ghz of 64 bit computing power. I've seen some pretty gnarly render farms and clusters in my day, but 11 Ghz in ONE COMPUTER? I nearly broke down and wept.
Even though the shaft might not spin at 16k RPM, the power will be "theoretically" twice that of the one engine. That's why I said that the computer was capable of of 11 Ghz of computing power, not necessarily that it was running at 11 Ghz... Wow, hope that makes sense, it's pretty late, and I'm feeling pretty good 
