[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sat, Oct 03, 2009 at 10:18:06AM -0400, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> Are they available at retail stores yet? I recall looking a couple weeks 
> ago and couldn't find them for sale...

They seem to be available from NewEgg for awhile.  Certainly it took
some time from when people said they were shipping until I could
actually find them from a reputable US dealer though.  See:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500030

> A hundred dollar MB with room for 4 Gigs of dual-channel memory, two  
> SATA ports, and an IDE port (or three SATA ports) would make a nice  
> network appliance box. An expansion slot that can take a dual port  
> gigabit NIC (PCI Express X1 or better, PCI-X would work, but would be  
> unlikely) would make it an excellent network appliance box, IMHO.

They aren't quite $100 though.  More like $170.
4 gigs of RAM.  There is a mini-PCIe slot, but that is probably useless
for your purposes.
3x SATA, 1x eSATA.

There is supposed to be a new version with a 16x PCIe slot, but I
wouldn't be surprised if it can't be found retail yet, and it will
probably be closer still to $200.

> By appliance I'm thinking Untangle, squid caching proxy, etc.

I really want a small affordable ZFS appliance, preferably in a rack
mount case.  I would think that a Atom board that I could slap into a
case I already have would be perfect.

> Intel has mini-ITX MBs that take socket 775 CPUs and 4 Gigs and have  
> nice expansion options, but they are $150 plus CPU, and consume 'normal 
> levels' of power...

Maybe I am just chicken, but I don't really want to install the CPU
myself.  I suppose it might not be as bad as it was in the P4 days
though.