Bored
(Posted by Sunny Kalsi )
Ok, so I was sitting in my apartment a couple of weeks ago, kinda bored just thinking about things. I was supposed to be the spring break but it was blowing a blizzard outside, I was kinda broke and my girlfriend was at her parent’s house studying for an exam. So not really wanting to do my thesis sized homework I thought I’d scribble down a wish list of parts for a sweet l337 computer. I started off with a classic old school power box with everything in its place doing its own thing, something not far off my current system but the SCSI card had RAID and I threw one of those physics processing cards in. But then as my thoughts wandered off I started thinking about a system not too dissimilar to the PS3 with a Cell processor (or two,) a simple mirror RAID and a NAS for bulk storage, and it would all fit in a nice slim enclosure and sit beside the TV. The only snag I hit was what if I wanted WiFi (or not,) or if I wanted a TV tuner card and do a little VTR type activities. I suppose it all comes down to those engineering types of decisions, trading the price, performance, flexibility and costs to produce something that people would actually want.
Not touching any sensitive topics that might result in a flame war, what do you guys and gals think? (and can the word “guys” be considered unisex these days?)
I’ve stopped holding out hope for the ps3. It will, IMHO, primarily be evil, and “t3h Gh3y”. The idea of the cell processor doing vector processing is still a great idea, and if IBM ever releases a cell blade then it might interest me. NAS is an interesting point, because I would think that something that does vector processing would generally be IO heavy (maybe not so much, but a lot of the times you might be doing de-interlacing or something and the CPU can do it a lot faster than the IO can).
For cases like that NAS is maybe not so good. Then again, I guess if it was a server, you could have it do that kind of thing in the background.