Yeah, I mis-read the supercomputer bit as meaning moving from the likes of SGi to x86 boxes.
Whereas now the definition of supercomputing is clustering for greater overall power, as you said.
After reading a little more of what he's said (as various other comments have popped up) I've come to the conclusion that Carmack's a fairly crafty fella.
I think the technology he's talking about is something ATI just used in some marketing, in a similarly misleading way. The hardware can be used to render to screen in realtime a scene an artist is working on. Albeit in a severely cut down form. But he's wording some of his statements to
imply that we're going to have the computing power of NASA sat in our AGP slots come next year.
Then what confuses me is statements like
Quote:
|
you will be able to fit more frame rendering power in a single tower case than Pixar's entire rendering farm. Next year.
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If you just stop and think about the feasibility of what he's saying.
That in under a year, the rendering power of a room (and it's a big room mind
) full of dual PIIIs/PIVs with several GB of RAM apiece, can be leveraged into a card small enough to fit in an AGP slot.
Forgive me if I'm being skeptical, but I just don't see that sort of leap happening in under a year.
I'm not suggesting he's wrong. I'd be more likely to go with the opinion that he's talking bull, and he knows it.