The software is only 32 bits, but AMD64's are fast CPUs, even in the 32-bit realm. I have one at home (3000+ Newcastle) and it cranks out the work pretty darn fast. They're also a bit cooler than their P4 equivalents because they run at a lower clock rate and have no north bridge on the motherboard.

To: Rick Alther
World Community Grid Application Developer

Thanks for your insight. I just started on this project when the IBM web site announcement came out. I am on the IBM America's team. I am with IBM on the Honeywell IGS Stategic Outsourcing contract, in Tempe, AZ. That contact has about 3,500 Engineering Workstations, like the IBM Intellisations or Unix Workstaitons. Has anyone you know of approached a large SO contract about using the idle processing of the thousands of Engineering W/S?

Is an Engineering Workstation, like an IBM Intellisations, that is focused on Floating Point Calulcations, the best type of system that is commercially available to run this type of applicaiton?

Any information would be helpful. Will this Applicaiton run on a Windows 2003 Server?

Actually the architecture of A64 platforms varies, there are the VIA, SiS and other similar groups that have both Northbridge and Southbridge chips.

However there is one manufacturer that has only one chip, nVidia's nForce chipsets only have one chip, there is no northbridge and southbridge, just the chipset as both north and south chips have been incorporated into one package.

And for a note, the northbridge controls the interface between the CPU and itself, the RAM (in P4 situations), the AGP/PCI Express 16X and the interconnect between it and the southbridge, the south chip controls everything else, IDE, sound, network, RAID, USB ports, Firewire ports, PCI slots, PCI Express 1X slots.

I have the Athlon64 3200 and it seems to be tearing right through it at a pretty swift pace. Can you imagine what one of those G5's with the dual 2.5's loaded full of RAM could do though? I was surprised not to see a download for the Mac since IBM is one of the sponsors for this project. Seeing how they are the ones that make the current processors for Apple.