Faster, pussycat! Process! PROCESS!! Yes, kidlings, it's time once again for Big Mac Watch, the segment of our show when we take a peek at the latest performance scores from Virginia Tech's Mac-based supercluster. Things are coming down to the wire-- it's November, final performances scores are due soon, and the school has only days left in which it can tune Big Mac 'til it hums. The cluster's scores have steadily increased since its initial somewhat disappointing 7.41 teraflops, and deep in underground bunkers beneath Hokie Central, green-skinned Rigellians with freakishly large brains are hard at work trying to coax ever more performance from its 1,100 Power Mac nodes. (Rigellians are good at that sort of thing. Plus, they'll work for Almond Joys.)

When last we tuned in to this gripping saga, Big Mac's score was still 9.555 teraflops, but Big Big Mac Man Srinidhi Varadarajan had remarked during a presentation last week that he hoped that his team might squeeze another 10% out of his little project before the mid-November deadline so that Big Mac could become "the first academic machine to cross 10 tera." As far as goals go, though, believe us when we tell you that the "10 tera" one won't win any medals in the "Long-Term" categories at this year's Lofty Goal Awards banquet-- it's less than a week later and Srinidhi has already hit his target.

Well, mostly; so far he's only extracted another 7.6%, not 10%, but that was still enough to put Big Mac over the top into double-digit performance territory. ("Don't you mean 'Tera-tory'?" you ask with a sly wink. No. No, we don't. Stop it.) According to the Dongorra Files, as of yesterday, Big Mac's official score was 10.28 teraflops, and the game still isn't over yet. (If you're the type who needs proof, faithful viewer David Triska has thoughtfully provided a screenshot so you don't need to wade through the whole PDF. But if you insist on checking the original source, Apple's entry is still on page 53.) It's worth noting that, for the first time, the test score reflects the use of all 2,200 processors, so apparently those 44 slacking Power Macs have finally gotten off the couch and started some heavy lifting.

There's still room to grow (Big Mac is still only performing at 58% of its theoretical peak), but the fact that it's already managed to wedge itself in third place on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers is turning heads-- and not just scientific heads. It's also turning big heads, mammoth-sized heads-- enormous heads of the non-Rigellian persuasion, packed with ego instead of smarts. In short, we're talking about Redmond-dwelling heads. Faithful viewer David Poves points out an article in The Register which reports that Microsoft has "licensed leading-edge processor technology from IBM for use in future Xbox products and services." Apparently Billy 'n' Ballmer have come to the conclusion that if the G5 can model massively complex weather systems and nuclear reactions, then doggone it, it must be good enough to model a "no-holds-barred badass" packin' heat.

Well, now, isn't that interesting? It's not entirely clear yet what the IBM-Microsoft deal entails (maybe it's not PowerPC-related at all), but while high-price suits like Rob Enderle and hundreds of armchair analysts have long predicted that Apple would have to switch from PowerPC to x86, instead it looks like Microsoft may be switching the Xbox (the closest thing to a personal computer that the company actually makes) from x86 to PowerPC. Big Mac: changing minds one innovation-throttling monopolist at a time.