My next workstation

[Ond]

Check it - take eight of these puppies, currently the "most powerful pro graphics card on the planet" - the Nvidia Quadro K6000 with 12 GB of GPU memory.



and stuff them all into a Xeon E5 CPU based (20 physical cores) chassis with 256 GB RAM and you get this:

The NVIDIA VCA (Visual Computing Appliance)



...and that's some mind blowing graphics computing power in one chassis.  I'm not really getting one, HEH ,but the thought occurs, Moore's Law isn't just in progress, it's leaping up and biting our asses!  These units are of course aimed at CGI rendering companies.  The flow on of this technology filters down to home users in the usual way.  They are available for purchase to the general public, but hideously expensive.  What I really want to know is.......






Will it play Galaxians? 

[yotsuya]

Check it - take eight of these puppies, currently the "most powerful pro graphics card on the planet" - the Nvidia Quadro K6000 with 12 GB of GPU memory.



and stuff them all into a Xeon E5 CPU based (20 physical cores) chassis with 256 GB RAM and you get this:

The NVIDIA VCA (Visual Computing Appliance)



...and that's some mind blowing graphics computing power in one chassis.  I'm not really getting one, HEH ,but the thought occurs, Moore's Law isn't just in progress, it's leaping up and biting our asses!  These units are of course aimed at CGI rendering companies.  The flow on of this technology filters down to home users in the usual way.  They are available for purchase to the general public, but hideously expensive.  What I really want to know is.......






Will it play Galaxians? 

Depends on the version of MAME. 

[wp34]

That rig might play Computer Space. 

[horizon]

Bit mining rig?

[BadMouth]

The Korean Taiwanese news will never be the same.

[jennifer]

  OMG that thing is UGLY tech, It actually makes my skin feel as if Jenn has bugs crawling on her....But you do make a good point, This is our future.

[SavannahLion]

meh

[Malenko]

  OMG that thing is UGLY tech, It actually makes my skin feel as if Jenn has bugs crawling on her....But you do make a good point, This is our future.

looks like a standard 2U or 3U rack mount server with a hokey plate on the front.

[Ond]

  OMG that thing is UGLY tech, It actually makes my skin feel as if Jenn has bugs crawling on her....But you do make a good point, This is our future.

looks like a standard 2U or 3U rack mount server with a hokey plate on the front.

  I guess my point is a bit more abstract than "look at this fugly rack server".  It would also be very noisy, hardly something to plonk down on your desk.  In fact they do stack these in render farms.  The technology represents a shift away from CPU based rendering (particularly in larger server farms) to more - relative to infrastructure overhead - powerful GPU based rendering.  The home games market now lives on the GPU and so even MAME is utilising GPUs for CRT emulation.  I'd love to own just one of those Quadro K6000 cards for my 3D drawing purposes but at over $5000 its not happening.

To liven this up a bit...... we have Hollywood ultimately to thank for the cutting edge graphics technology.  My thinking goes something like this:

Hollywood must get bums on seats, the target demographic is now and has been since the mid 70's - Teens.
(like the song says "who cares what its about as long as the kids go"
Teens like to see BIG ACTION EFX, for example the latest Jupiter Rising movie - which I hear is a real cerebral treat BTW.
Cost effective CGI means better box office profit.
so... the GPU market gets driven along (also pushed by the games market).
The technology flows down into the affordable space you and I dwell in.

We can play Galaxian - better, gooder, faster.  OK that bit is silly but you know what I mean doncha? 

[nitrogen_widget]

if you don't mind a little lag you could just put thin clients in your cabs & serve up mame with one of those.

[johnrt]

This would be perfect for running VMware Horizon View (virtual desktop). Then you just need a thin-client in your arcades from now on. Only ONE MAME-installation to maintain also. 

[Malenko]

I guess my point is a bit more abstract than "look at this fugly rack server".

My point is that pretty much all rack mount servers are fugly 

[Locke141]

I have friends that own a successful post house in Brooklyn. It's alway fun see there new toys when I'm on Home leave. Last time they were installing a Xeon based RAID server with something like 12 4.5'ish TB hard drives, and two dual gigabit ethernet cards. I think I'm getting most of the details right

It makes me wish I went into an industry where I got to play with cool toys at work. I just remembered my school has a 60 watt CNC laser and other goodies.         

[Locke141]

.