Re: Speed problem with 1.03 on Mac G4

Jonathan Morton wrote:

>
> Yes, an Xserve is an impressively compact and powerful piece of kit.  
> It also happens to cost upwards of $2000, so it's a significant 
> investment for a spammer to make - it'll raise the bar at least a bit.
>
> But, let's assume the worst-case scenario, which is that a prolific 
> and thus well-funded spammer has made this investment in a rack of 10 
> Xserves.  In that case, a "limit" of ~900K mails a day is still a 
> pretty large figure, and is unlikely to affect his operations too 
> badly.  If anything, he might have to charge a little more per message 
> to remain profitable, but it's still a pretty small cost from the 
> spammer's client's point of view.
>
>
Back to the subject of the G5 and 'high-end minting systems' for a 
moment....

The dual-G5 Xserve is about 9 gigaflops, for $2,000. That's $222 per 
gigaflop . A company called Orion Multisystems have just announced a 
workstation offering between 18 and 36 gigaflops for about $9,000.... 
Works out at between $250 and $500 per  gigaflop. But I wonder what sort 
of hashing performance it would give?;

http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,95581,00.html
"But this PC puts out about 18 GFLOPS of sustained performance and 36 
GFLOPS of peak performance under certain conditions. Transmeta Corp.'s 
90-nanometer Efficeon processors are the reason Orion can pack so much 
performance into a relatively small package, Hunter said. Hunter and 
Orion vice president of engineering Ed Kelly are very familiar with 
Transmeta's chips because they co-founded that company before joining 
Orion."

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=6105683
"<>Orion's DS-96 deskside Cluster Workstation is capable of handling 150 
billion calculations per second on a regular basis and up to 300 billion 
operations at peak moments. It offers hard disk capacity with up to 9.6 
trillion bytes of storage. The cost of the machines is in line with 
standard prices for research workstations, officials said. The basic 
12-chip model runs around $10,000 and the 96-chip computer costs upward 
of $100,000"