The cables they are replacing are already oil cooled so there is not a great increase in maintenance.
They are replacing 9 wires with 3. I am guessing these are parallel lines running underground. The 3 will take up much less room, which is a big deal. In central cities power lines are run through underground conduits/pipes. These conduits are very crowded due increasing power requirements in central cities. Replacing copper lines with superconducting lines allows the power companies to meet rising power requirements without tearing up the streets to lay new conduits.
Rambus can have lower latency and higher bandwidth
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Will Rambus Go Bust?
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Intel's chip sets and processors are the problem. Thier processors can only handle a data bus of 64bits @ 133Mhz. When you put memory on a chip set at the other end of this, a single rambus chanel exceeds the bandwidth available on the data bus. The latency sucks because you have the latency through the chipset added to the inherent latency of the Rambus protocol. However Rambus (and other serial memory interfaces) greatly reduce the pin count necessary for a given bandwidth. A performance system could use this to put the memory controller on the processor eliminating one part of the latency. Also multiple memory channels could be put in one system to increase the total bandwidth. The current designs from Intel is just a hack of thier current chipset and do not try to take advantage of the possibilities.
The studies on the Monarch butterfly affected by BT pollen showed, in a lab, that if the catepillar ate the BT pollen vs. non BT pollen (The pollen happens to fall on the leaf of a different plant they are eating) they grew slower and had a higher mortality. What do you think happens when the farmer sprays his non BT crop with pesticides to kill the corn borer the BT protects against. I would guess the pesticide nearly wipes out the nearby catepillars. After all the corn borer is just a different spiecies of catepillar. In my opinion GM crops are the best chance to have a sustainable crop production without dumping tons of chemicals on the crops and into the ground, like is the current pratice.
> The new environment will run on X86 (hint: atx mothboard mentioned in text!)
ATX does not imply x86. ATX is a form factor and power supply specification. It basically allows different motherboards to use the same case design. I have an ATX board at home with an Alpha as are most third party Alpha boxes. (note not x86)
Check out Tandem machines. They do something similar with two cpus that continously compare results and back up to a previous point if there is a miscompare. This requires alot of hardware as well as software. http://www.tandem.com I believe there are some other companies that also do this or have done this in the past.
In related hardware highend IBM mainframes come with more CPUs than the system can support at one time. The extra CPU(s) will take over a job of one of the currently working CPUs fails.
Ofcourse all of this stuff is very high end and very expensive to build.
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The cables they are replacing are already oil cooled so there is not a great increase in maintenance.
They are replacing 9 wires with 3. I am guessing these are parallel lines running underground. The 3 will take up much less room, which is a big deal. In central cities power lines are run through underground conduits/pipes. These conduits are very crowded due increasing power requirements in central cities. Replacing copper lines with superconducting lines allows the power companies to meet rising power requirements without tearing up the streets to lay new conduits.
If you want to know more about this system look at this link on the hardware. http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/gs320/index.html
Intel's chip sets and processors are the problem. Thier processors can only handle a data bus of 64bits @ 133Mhz. When you put memory on a chip set at the other end of this, a single rambus chanel exceeds the bandwidth available on the data bus. The latency sucks because you have the latency through the chipset added to the inherent latency of the Rambus protocol.
However Rambus (and other serial memory interfaces) greatly reduce the pin count necessary for a given bandwidth. A performance system could use this to put the memory controller on the processor eliminating one part of the latency. Also multiple memory channels could be put in one system to increase the total bandwidth.
The current designs from Intel is just a hack of thier current chipset and do not try to take advantage of the possibilities.
The studies on the Monarch butterfly affected by BT pollen showed, in a lab, that if the catepillar ate the BT pollen vs. non BT pollen (The pollen happens to fall on the leaf of a different plant they are eating) they grew slower and had a higher mortality. What do you think happens when the farmer sprays his non BT crop with pesticides to kill the corn borer the BT protects against. I would guess the pesticide nearly wipes out the nearby catepillars. After all the corn borer is just a different spiecies of catepillar.
In my opinion GM crops are the best chance to have a sustainable crop production without dumping tons of chemicals on the crops and into the ground, like is the current pratice.
> The new environment will run on X86 (hint: atx mothboard mentioned in text!)
ATX does not imply x86. ATX is a form factor and power supply specification. It basically allows different motherboards to use the same case design. I have an ATX board at home with an Alpha as are most third party Alpha boxes. (note not x86)
Check out Tandem machines. They do something similar with two cpus that continously compare results and back up to a previous point if there is a miscompare. This requires alot of hardware as well as software.
http://www.tandem.com
I believe there are some other companies that also do this or have done this in the past.
In related hardware highend IBM mainframes come with more CPUs than the system can support at one time. The extra CPU(s) will take over a job of one of the currently working CPUs fails.
Ofcourse all of this stuff is very high end and very expensive to build.