Time for a Hardware Upgrade?

June 28, 2000 7:30 AM UTC
Tired of rebooting Windows 98 all the time? Frustrated because MS Office 2000 takes so long to start and then drains your system resources in no time flat? And how about all those downloads taking up all your precious disk space?

The solution is here. It's called ASCI White.

If you're into e-commerce, this is your machine. It can process up to five billion transactions per second.

And it will run up to 100 hours without a crash, beating out Windows 98 easily.

That's about it. Pretty good machine, all things considered.

Size is roughly two basketball courts - so empty your garage before delivery.

Oh - it might be hard to find a model on the market, as there's only one in existence, and frankly, it's already been bought. But the owner might tire of it, so stay tuned to radsoft.net for further news updates.

And IBM says this type of monster machine will be the widely affordable workstation of choice within a decade, so maybe you'll find use for your Windows 2000 license yet.

The follow up is expected to be over three times as fast, and its follow up again over three times as fast, or ten times as fast as this current model, or over 100 teraflops, so you will probably be able to run Whistler on it too.

PS. IBM, in contrast to Microsoft, have a reputation for not letting the customer down. As a case in point, ASCI White turned out to be 23% faster than the customer asked for.

http://www.llnl.gov/asci/news/white_news.html
http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2000/06/28/technology/ibm/
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37285-2,00.html
http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/resource/pressreleases/2000/Jun/asci_white.html