Once in a while, /. comes good (tip: just go to the story links, ignore the comments). This just in: 96 Processors Under Your Desktop, a concept called the "cluster workstation". See also tech blog story, press release and CNET news.
The 12-CPU, 24 GB RAM model apparently markets for <USD 10 000. I want.
Comments
Personal use
Wow, what can I say, a 96 processor cluster under your desk (see the cnet article for the picture), amazing but I wonder how noisy the fans are. 10,000 for a personal 12 node cluster is almost within reason for home use. It really doesn't make any difference for institutes as they can just keep adding nodes to their existing clusters. Generic components will make clusters a cheap future investment.
More notes
I just spotted in the CNET article that Bioteam are to sell the 12-CPU version preloaded with 200 applications - the Inquire suite, presumably.
Comments from the tech blog story are interesting. The machine use Transmeta CPUs - I know nothing about these, but there is some suggestion that they are not especially high-end, to say the least.
transmeta CPUs
To say the least, they typically perform at around half the speed of a similarly clocked p4, 75% the speed of an Athlon (going by clock speeds, of course) but they would be very quite. The CPUs were designed for low power consumption, for laptops and the like. That makes them great for a laptop (some laptops with these chips have >10hr battery life) but not great performance. Personally, I'd rather go with any of the under-the-desk clusters that most large cluster venders will sell. Like Apple's Workgroup cluster something like 16 G5s (8 Xserves). They're bioinformatics version comes with the common software preinstalled with a GUI front end.