New Class of High-End Servers to support Video Streams of the Future

from ACE Technews - - Don't pretend to understand hardware but do know enough about bandwidth to understand this is part of the next steps in supporting VLE

Sun and I.B.M. to Offer New Class of High-End
Servers

New York Times (04/26/07) P. C10; Markoff, John
Sun Microsystems and IBM both introduced new high-end server systems that provide an early glimpse into a new era of computing. Sun's machine, designed by the company co-founder Andreas Bechtolsheim, is an ultra-fast video server potentially powerful enough to send different standard video streams simultaneously to everyone watching television in a city the size of New York. IBM's machine is a video game server that blends a mainframe computer with the company's Cell microprocessors, creating a system that could support thousands of users interacting in a three-dimensional simulated on-screen world, described as the "metaverse." Both machines will cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, but they represent that the modern computing world is moving away from the era of cheap microprocessors that started two decades ago. Former ACM President David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California,Berkeley, said he believes that is still more to be done with combining microprocessors, but "if the future of computing is the data center and the consumer gadget," the two new machines could be the wave of the future.
"It's a new era--it's the era of application-specific computing," said Bernard S. Meyerson, chief technologist of IBM's Systems and Technology Group. Meyerson said that IBM has introduced hybrid computing, and that computers will now be custom-designed for specific purposes.

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