From: Thomas Buckner (tcbevolver@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 05 2005 - 17:32:59 MST
--- pdugan <pdugan@vt.edu> wrote:
> >Or wait three years and buy 5000 XBox 360's
> (each
> >effectively a teraflop machine, I hear) on
> EBay
> >and yard sales at 100 clams each. Same $500k,
> 12
> >years sooner. Like Ben said, it's really the
> >payroll that's a problem.
> >
> >Tom Buckner
> >
>
> My gut tells me that XBox 360's would be more
> problematic for extending the
> software than a typical PC, because the
> console's OS is designed with thick
> layers of developer-oriented libraries geared
> toward VRAM use and graphics
> tricks. However, it is essentially Windows, and
> offers a nice suite of online
> software and hardware, so that might just be a
> hot ticket. Imagine, the
> Singularity launched over Xbox Live by 2012!
Except there's talk of getting 360's to run Linux
too. Whilst waiting for the price to fall, one
lets others do the grunt work on figuring out how
to get them to run as Linux clusters. Gaming
machines do tend to have a high price/power
ratio. Also it's occurred to me that, since so
much of a gaming machine's power is committed to
rendering video to look hyper-realistic, such
machines might lend themselves well to artificial
vision by 'reversing the flow' of visual data,
particle physics, etc., so to speak. If one were
clever enough to implement it, which I'm not.
Tom Buckner
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