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Coolest Desk Ever!

What a shame to waste some perfectly good CPUs, they could be put to good use crunching numbers...although I don't think there is an IA64 port of SETI, is there?
 
Originally posted by: OneOfTheseDays
What a waste......they couldn't find ANY use for those chips?
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It was probably a government installation, we'll just pay more taxes for the new one 😉
 
Originally posted by: mrCide
seems wasteful, it's not like they were 486s
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As far as supercomputers go, they are. The author doesn't go in to detail on what exact model these are, but Itanium chips can be as old as 733mhz relics from 2001. Once they're too slow for a supercomputer, there's nothing else left to do with them; they're not suitable for normal user machines due to the architecture, and due to the massive speed difference between those and newer processors, they'd be a poor choice to build a supercomputer on the cheap because of the power draw as opposed to a few modern processors.

As far as supercomputers are concerned, an old Itanium is a 486.
 
Originally posted by: ViRGE
Originally posted by: mrCide
seems wasteful, it's not like they were 486s
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As far as supercomputers go, they are. The author doesn't go in to detail on what exact model these are, but Itanium chips can be as old as 733mhz relics from 2001. Once they're too slow for a supercomputer, there's nothing else left to do with them; they're not suitable for normal user machines due to the architecture, and due to the massive speed difference between those and newer processors, they'd be a poor choice to build a supercomputer on the cheap because of the power draw as opposed to a few modern processors.

As far as supercomputers are concerned, an old Itanium is a 486.
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That isn't limited to Itaniums. All enterprise level CPUs obsolesce much more rapidly than consumer level CPUs. Also, they are useful for a lot more than just being part of a supercomputer.

I still think this was a waste. I actually work at an Itanium design center and people were talking about this earlier today. Surely they could have donated them to a more useful cause. Even if they were based on Merced, they still could have been put to use considering the architecture is still functional and has limited capability even compared to today's standards and IA-64 instruction set.

 
Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles

perfectly usably good hubcaps or spoons? 😉 😛
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Hubcaps and spoons don't need thousands of dollars of necessary hardware to work. 😛

 
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