As the Apple Turns: Scene 2747: Crying Over Spilt Milk (12/18/00)

Crying Over Spilt Milk (12/18/00)

Plenty of you out there in Television Land have long given up on watching Motorola for lack of action-- and we agree, it's got a painfully slow-moving plot. Instead, some of you are tuning into IBM for your PowerPC-themed entertainment, hoping that the action will be a little faster on the Big Blue channel. Well, we don't know about that, but we did stumble across a nifty little CNET story about a genetics firm who just rented a humongous supercomputer from IBM. According to the article, this thing contains five thousand processors and is apparently so large that it has to be installed in chunks over the course of a year-- into "one floor of a professional office building in downtown Atlanta." (The article doesn't mention what color the thing is.)

Now, if you're like us, you're probably thinking that Apple really dropped the ball on this one. After all, the company has its own supercomputers to sell-- ones that are a lot smaller and that, coincidentally, just happen to be overstocked in the retail channel right now. So why didn't Apple get in there and persuade this genetics company to buy a Cube instead? After all, the latest addition to Apple's board of directors is Art Levinson, a guy who just happens to be the CEO of Genentech, Inc. That, more than likely, qualifies as an "in" to the wild and wooly world of human genome mapping, right? Plus we all know that Art is a Cube fan, since he appeared in that promotional video months before he joined Apple's board. So couldn't he have gone in and won the sale?

Okay, sure, IBM's supercomputer is a little more powerful than Apple's brain-in-a-box. Reportedly Big Blue's Big Box can crank out up to 7.5 teraflops, which is over two thousand times more instructions per second than the G4's theoretical maximum 3.6 gigaflop performance. On the other hand, the Cube looks pretty sitting on a desk, so it pretty much all evens out. And if these guys really needed 7.5 teraflops, we're sure Apple could have sold them five or six thousand Cubes and solved its overstock problem at the same time. In fact, IBM's supercomputer cost "tens of millions of dollars" (which we interpret to mean at least $20 million), whereas six thousand Cubes would have run them a mere $10,794,000. And that's retail, for Pete's sake!

Still, that ship has sailed. Hopefully, at the very least, IBM's supercomputer has given Apple some more ideas about how to fight the Megahertz War via the magic of multiprocessing: 5000-processor Power Mac G4/500, anyone?

SceneLink (2747)

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The above scene was taken from the 12/18/00 episode:

December 18, 2000: Apple misses the boat, and IBM sells a 5000-processor supercomputer to a genetics research firm. Meanwhile, Mac shoppers at Circuit City this weekend reportedly found the cupboards bare, and another Mac Voodoo maker bites the dust-- NVIDIA gulps down 3dfx like so much holiday eggnog...

Other scenes from that episode:

2748: Escalating Retail Carnage (12/18/00) Goodness gracious, we certainly are mired in the throes of the holiday shopping season, aren't we? Throngs of stressed consumers are one missed discount sale away from painting their faces with pig's blood and running amuck in the mall with crudely-fashioned spears...
2749: Sticking Pins In The Doll (12/18/00) Individual consumers aren't the only ones cruising for bargains this holiday season; apparently at least one graphics card company is snapping up a great deal, too. We all knew that 3dfx was already in rough financial waters-- and then this accursed "worldwide PC sales slowdown" threatened to capsize it completely...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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