Seen this?

nickdakick

Platinum Member
Jun 27, 2000
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Well somebody(Anand?) should check it out. If it works, if they can deliver in numbers would be areally cool device. BTW IMO it should be available exclusively to team AnandTech members for free courtesy of AnanTech.;)
 

vss1980

Platinum Member
Feb 29, 2000
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Hmm, wouldn't it be good if they made a board that you could plug ordinary CPU's into for cracking, give a home to all those old Cyrix's and Celeron's. After all, I remember my old ISA IDE 8.5MB cache controller card had an AMD 80186-25 MHz chip on, so with the PCI bus power available now, such a device must be possible.
 

vss1980

Platinum Member
Feb 29, 2000
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Come to think of it though, it does go against the idea and philosophy of distributed computing. The idea is that people use the spare time of their CPU to take care of this (which also means dedicated herds are also against the idea, but hey if you have the money :)), whereas this card can be classed as dedicated hardware and anyone who has read the D.net history/past stories section will know that dedicated hardware can wrap up a competition in a fraction of the time.

That being said, when do we get a RC5 and GF one? :)
 

Train

Lifer
Jun 22, 2000
13,584
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www.bing.com
that was kinda cool, even though im not really into seti, 6 processors on a PCI card, thats crazy, i bet that would be easy to overclock, plus all those CPU's and no heatsinks, if you have some room next to your PCI slot, I'd put some major cooling on this puppies.
 

nickdakick

Platinum Member
Jun 27, 2000
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WTF cares ? If this thing works we can crunch a lot faster and that's IMO all that counts. Just signed up for beta-testing the thing.
 

Batti

Golden Member
Feb 2, 2000
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Be really careful - this sounds like a scam to me. I doubt they could do all that in the space they have with surplus parts for the price they quote.
 

Postman

Senior member
Oct 30, 1999
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Well you never know.. US Army has a well known past of not being so meticulously strict with their goods :)
 

Russ

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
21,093
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Batti,

They're asking $474 for the fully populated board. It's certainly not cheap. Not saying it's not a scam, still could be; only that the price is high enough to cover production costs. The only real cost is the card itself. The chips can be had for pennies.

Russ, NCNE
 

charrison

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
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Just a couple of comments. Each cpu would need at least 32meg to run
SETI. So that is 6 cpus and 180meg of ram.
 

networkman

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
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Yeah, what Russ said! :D

Isn't 256 megs the bare minimum you need for any Win 9x or 2K system?

I'm happy with 512 megs! :D
 

Dantoo

Golden Member
Dec 15, 1999
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Nickdakick has a good point. If Anand was able to do a hardware test on one, it would be strong move in support of the SETI team. The advantage for the makers would obviously be credibility for the product.

Perhaps if Assim or one of the other SETI team was to email and ask if it is possible to arrange to have one tested. It certainly would be a valid hardware test in the AT paradigm.
 

JHutch

Golden Member
Oct 11, 1999
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I'd love to see Anand review one, because right now I'm fairly convinced it is a hoax of some kind ... The biggest indicator is that most chips used in military operations are SLOW by our standards. Plus, no one has been able to find any information on the chips themselves or the missiles they came from. Plus, how did they get a SETI client for these mystery chips? Unless they are binary compatible with Alpha, or X86 or something, I don't see how it could be possible ...

JHutch