VMD-L Mailing List

From: Benjamin Goldsteen (bzgnyc_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Apr 06 2005 - 16:58:07 CDT

Hi Karsten,

You could always go with an SGI Prism -- the entry level is expandable
up to 8 processors and 4 graphics pipes. Not exactly desktop and you
probably meant an IA32 compatible Linux system. The Itanium can run
IA32 software but I recall the performance penalty is around 2-4X
(performs somewhere around a 1GHz Pentium III). Still it would be fast
and actually supported for what you want to do.

Unfortunately, 2-processor systems are the sweet-spot as far as
hardware price/performance and that is where most vendors/manufactures
target their offerings. 4-processor systems typically cost 2-3X as
much per processor as 2-processor systems. As such, they are usually
reserved for database and similar applications.

You could buy a Dell PowerEdge 6850 server (which has 4 PCI-Express
slots) and then add an nVidia QuadroFX 1300 or better card and monitor.
  Cost would be around $12K and up plus monitor and Linux. Probably not
a very common/supported configuration...you might find that it is
easier/cheaper to go with a good 1-2p workstation and several 2p
servers.