Mad scientist thinking

[DJ-Daz]

So I'm a little bored at today and got to thinking about ultimate PC's.

Multiple CPU's on a mobo.
Servers have them, but at £500 for a motherboard and at least that much again per CPU it's really pie in the sky thinking.
But clusters could work, not as fast (or maybe faster) than the above. The only problem is the OS. It's linux only (I think) and it wont be for games.

There used to be a threshold for CPU's on a mobo, 4 was the limit and anything more and it'd be slower than a single CPU because it would take more processing power to control the flow of traffic. I don't think this is a problem now, not with multiple cores, but even the venerated Sony Cell needs one core to control the others.

Clusters on the other hand are multiple PC's connected via high speed networks. But are they as fast or are the faster? Faster I think, it's how super computers work.

What about Windows 7 on a RAM Drive?
I'm waiting for SSD's to drop in price, I'd need at least a 256GB x 2 for my basic OS and applications. That's well over £200 and nearer £300 in reality.
But I've got 16GB of RAM, why not just use that for the OS only?
Firstly windows 7 needs 2GB of RAM for the 64Bit OS, so thats 14GB free. Secondly you'd need 20GB of free space for the install alone. So really you'd need 24GB minimum @ £130 so SSD's don't look so bad after all.

Solid State Drives.
2 striped SSD giving 512GB might be the best bet.
But what about holographic drives? IBM thought that they'd be available in the early 21st century, around the turn of the new millennium, but sadly we're still waiting.
The capacity though is astonishing. A disk the size of a DVD/CD could hold easily 6 terrabytes or more. Transfer rates are also really up there in the gigabytes per second.

Sadly all this is vaporware, all except clusters and SSD's.
But wouldn't it be nice if one day this was all available and cheap?