[geeks] New Cray?

[nate at portents.com]

> Ok, for a really important question, how fast can one rip a Blue Ray disk?

I don't think it will help with ripping, since you're going to be limited
by the drive speed of Blu-Ray drives.  Might help with transcoding if you
have a highly-multithreaded transcoder... but even then, I don't think the
problem will scale that well to make use of that many cores.

Intel has 6-core CPUs coming out this year, 8-core next year.  That means
in a little while a dual-socket motherboard will mean 16 cores and
quad-socket is 32 cores.  Most quad-socket boards fit in EATX cases, and a
1000W PSU should handle that just fine, so 32 CPUs won't be that
outrageous in the not-too-distant future.  What will be expensive is the
registered, ECC DDR3 memory...

- Nate