Asus launches new 'personal supercomputer'

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Several places are reporting (Engadget and Computerworld, for example) that Asustek, the company that makes motherboards and the better known Eee PC has launched a personal supercomputer around NVIDIA’s GPUs. As The Register points out the specs that have been reported don’t make sense, since with 3 Teslas it should be good for nearly 3 TFLOPS (single precision performance) — the Computerworld article is reporting 1.1 TFLOPS peak though.

From that article

A note in Asus’s literature said the ESC 1000 has a cost structure in software and hardware of $14,519 (£8,900) over five years, but an Asus representative declined to give a per-unit price or when the ESC 1000 would be available globally. The supercomputers are ready to ship, he said.

The ESC 1000 is the result of collaboration between Asustek, Nvidia and Taiwan’s National Chao Tung University.

We’ve covered other personal supercomputer announcements, so I thought this was worth a mention. At that price it fits in between the SGI Octane III and Cray’s X1, but doesn’t really share much else with them since the Asustek box only sports a single socket motherboard with the Intel Xeon W3580 server processor.