Xserve-like new PowerMac Tower enclosure.
- Thread starter ddma
- Start date
Originally posted by jeb1138
I love the hot-swappable idea! But as for being more likely in the PC world I'd have to say: dream on! Apple would probably be the first, if not only, possible company for such a breakthrough. A tremendous challenge in implementing such configurations is the cross-linking of the different "nodes", as they are called, and getting software that will work with such a configuration. TCP/IP, for example, has problems with this after a certain extent. Right now the software and hardware for these components are custom-built.
Apple is the only consumer computer company remaining with control over both the hardware and software. This means it's harder to get cheap, 3rd party parts but it also means that they have enormous power to innovate and push new technologies forward. In my opinion they have done this -- they have to to stay competitive.
Because Apple controls and has controlled both the software and hardware aspects of the computer they would be the most capable of doing something like a cluster computer setup. Can you imagine trying to implement something like that in the endless sea of tweaked components that is the PC World? No way. Or at least, not until after a million more headaches (and years) than Apple. The PC powers-that-be would form a consortium and work out standards and make concessions and change directives and publish lots of papers, while Apple needs no consortium -- just get up and go!
But of course I have no idea whether something like a "Plug-n-Play" cluster could ever really make sense for regular consumers or businesses. Just sounds cool!If you could expand your processing power as much as you could pay for and do it without leaving your old machinery behind....wow!
Oh yeah, and speaking of 23" lcd monitors, does anybody here have one?
I have to disagree. Apple would never do this. They barely even let you upgrade the processor in their current offerings. Apple is a hardware company, they need to sell more than processors to stay in business.
True, the PC market is a bunch of yellow-tape but I could honestly see Sun or SGI coming up with something like plug-in-play hot swapable processors. They control the hardware and software still but are for the professional business market.
It's funny how people keep chiming in saying stuff like "with todays technology, that would be impossible!"
We're not talking about today's technology people! We are essentially brain storming, fantisizing and having fun.
jeb1138
Carioca
Amen!
They don't offer much hardware customization. That makes the best business sense for Apple right now -- keep it simple, practically give away great software (e.g. FCP) and keep the small user base buying computers. However, if...
Yah! And that would it make business sense! And Apple is by far the best-situated consumer computer company to push new things like that forward.
Hey Ed, got any more ideas?
Originally posted by Ed Spruiell
uh, how about software that would make a umax usb scanner work with os x? now, that would be genius
no wait, that's just too far fetched to imagine isn't it
You can send your UMAX USB scanner to me. It'll work perfectly with Windows 98, 2000 and XP and depending on what model, Linux to!
Excalibur
Registered
That was tried on the internal level before. Remember the 8500 and 9500 systems. The processors were cards. The old 604 was expanded like that. nPower made dual and even quad procesor cards. Would have been nice if that concept was more common. However as someone pointed out bus bottlenecking might be an issue at some point with todays higher clocks. Still I like the idea though.
Originally posted by Excalibur
That was tried on the internal level before. Remember the 8500 and 9500 systems. The processors were cards. The old 604 was expanded like that. nPower made dual and even quad procesor cards. Would have been nice if that concept was more common. However as someone pointed out bus bottlenecking might be an issue at some point with todays higher clocks. Still I like the idea though.
The G4 is just a card that plugs into the MB. Intel tried doing this with Slot 1 and found it very costly.
What we're suggesting is totally different. We want a processor, the size of a match box, that we can plug into a external port on our computers. We want them to be hot swapable, and to be able to interlock and make a chain so we can hookup more than 1.
Imagine having something like that that you could switch between your desktop and notebook on the fly depending on what you were doing.
How about a WiFi CPU. Your desktop could pass off processor cycles to your PowerBook depending on what it was doing. If you had several computers, they could all feed off eachother. Distributed computing!
Excalibur
Registered
Sounds like an external ZIF socket to me. No different than just buying a plain G4 CPU and pluggin in. The problem is making it external is the connection method to daisy chain it to run parallel on the motherboard there. Interesting concept. I have to agree though that would be something revolutionary indeed. We'll both have to cross our fingers.