Wednesday, October 6, 2004 |
15:06 - Megawatt Macs
http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=48800573
|
(top) |
The business world is sitting up and taking notice: Apple has a honey of a solution for 'em.
Defense contractor Colsa Corp. buys high-performance computer clusters for the U.S. Army. That means competitive bidding, as in the case of an Army supercomputer project that went up for bid in April. With requirements that specified footprint, power-management options, and a peak performance of 25 teraflops--computational speed surpassed by only one supercomputer in the world as of August--the company fielded proposals from six major vendors. "Apple won on technical [merits] and cost," executive VP Anthony DiRienzo says.
. . .
The difference isn't simply that the G5 chip draws significantly less power than competing chips, says Alex Grossman, director of hardware storage at Apple. Through its control of hardware and software, Apple has been able to design custom input/output components that allow the use of more affordable, more energy-efficient disk storage without sacrificing data transfer speed. "Our Serial ATA [has] three 7,200-rpm drives in there, which draw less than half the power of SCSI drives that most people use and generate half the heat," Grossman boasts. "We can get similar performance to what people get in 10,000-rpm SCSI drives. And in a lot of cases, we approach what they get with 15,000-rpm drives."
And the costs stay low. "The cost is really a commodity-cost level," Grossman says.
Well then. I guess that explains why Apple has shunned SCSI, after being the SCSI banner-bearer for so very long. They're doing better with Serial ATA on performance and price. Hard to argue with that, I guess...
There's a lot more. Especially the very last sentence, which is the very distillation of all that is Apple.
|
|