Sun Brings up a Valid Point

The most expensive hall at CeBIT is Hall 2, home of companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. We strolled by Sun's booth and saw this interesting demo:

On the left we've got a rack of Niagara 2 servers, on the right a rack of 4-year old Intel Xeon servers (16 CPUs total). Both systems are at idle and the difference in power consumption is tremendous: 180W for the Sun rack and nearly 1100W for the NetBurst Xeon rack.

Obviously the comparison would be far less skewed if we looked at Core 2 based products but the point is still valid: these old NetBurst based servers are power hogs and upgrading them would definitely help reduce datacenter power bills. Despite the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture being our least favorite Intel creation, it still sold very well and these old Xeons continue to litter datacenters today.

Whether you replace them with Core 2 based Xeons or Niagara 2 based products, you'll still end up significantly reducing your power bill.

Intel's Wall of 4 North Carolina at CeBIT?
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  • AmberClad - Thursday, March 6, 2008 - link

    Thermaltake Armor IV
    Thermaltake Xaser IV
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, March 6, 2008 - link

    Thanks for the info. Gotta say those cases are F'GLY though.
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, March 6, 2008 - link

    Found this one too, but it's VERY expensive -
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, March 6, 2008 - link

    Dammit - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
  • cjsketchy - Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - link

    Pandas everywhere are cursing this latest 'innovation' from Asus... what a waste of effort. Never understood why anyone would want to enclose a computer in such a poor conductor of heat.
  • 7Enigma - Friday, March 7, 2008 - link

    Uh, and plastic is so much better?
  • rudy - Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - link

    I am interested in the NIA. But my main question is what else can you do with it. To reduce CTS it would be great if you could just type with it. I have never been happy with voice recognition so far and it doesnt work well in an office with other people. But if these products could be made with enough input recognition to at least get the letters numbers and punctuation of the keyboard I would buy it in a hearbeat. Imagine taking notes in class without bothering people with the keys and writing documents and emails quickly and silently.
  • augmentedreality - Wednesday, July 29, 2009 - link

    I just picked an OCZ NIA up.. I know this is an old thread.. I haven't spent hours training it yet but I am anticipating some interesting hacks out soon and maybe some firmware hacks since this is a pretty cheap item now. Anyway, I will review further on my own site as I play with it, you can catch that at http://automatedhome.ca">http://automatedhome.ca and soon at augmenting-reality.com where I intend to try out all these devices to put together a good William Gibson style portable computer complete with Vusix 920AV glasses and some Nvidia or android or Iphone device at the center.. anyway, more to come son on what I can get this toy to do..;)

    Craig - http://automatedhome - http://augmenting-reality.com
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - link

    Could you please find out if the Asus Xonar HDAV card will output TrueHD and DTS MA bitstream, or only LPCM?
  • strafejumper - Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - link

    coool a device that can sense when i move my eyebrows

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