The Typhoon: 8 CPU Monster Computer

It's now possible to check you email even faster than before thanks to the hard working individuals at the Tyan Corporation. In the ever advancing world of computers, a Taiwanese Company (Tyan Corp.) has pledged to ship a personal supercomputer that is powered by eight Xeon processors. And if you thought that 8 CPUs weren't enough, each one is a dual-core which means that it actually contains 2 processors per chip making this behemoth a sixteen core computer. To top this all off, the computer boasts a beefy 48GB of memory which means that the computer probably has a better memory that most of us.

The supercomputer is officially named Typhoon and the Tyan CEO is quoted as saying, "it'll blow you away"; Appropriate words from a man who is offering one beast of a machine. The system has four removable motherboards each which run 2 Xeon chips, 12GB of memory, and 1 hard drive.

Each motherboard is operated as a node and are run co-operatively using Windows or Linux clustering software. The yields good performance for scientific and other computationally heavy tasks. But they hope to broaden the application of this machine to beyond engineering and science.

preceding the Typhoon is the B5191, a toned down version with only 4 CPUs aimed at the cost conscious crowd. I guess it isn't as deserving of a great name as the Typhoon. Both models have eight USB and eight Gigabit Ethernet ports and on-board video cards with 16MB of dedicated memory each.

Don't grab your credit card yet because either model won't be out until the end of the summer and even then you have to shell out $10,000 for the high-end model. And if the price doesn't chew up all of your green, operating this machine 24/7 might. At 14000W total per box, you might need to purchase a substation and put it outside your office.