OK, this isn’t really mobile technology, but it is vaguely relevant and made me smile so I am posting it.

Asustek Computer announced, in a departure from it’s normal focus on budget minded consumer products, it’s very first supercomputer this week. It is called the ESC 1000 and doesn’t use an Atom. The ESC 1000 hits computing speeds of up to 1.1 trillion flops (floating point operations a second). Just for perspective, a standard chip like a Centrino hits around 4 billion flops, and an Atom manages around 2 billion flops. Computers like the ESC 1000 are typically used for medical and scientific purposes, or for really kicking butt at Halo III.

Am I very bad for wishing Asus had called this new machine the Asus EeeXtreme?

Check out more about the specs of this desktop bad boy after the jump.

The ESC 1000 runs a 3.33GHz Intel LGA1366 Xeon W3580 designed for servers, in addition to 960 graphics processing cores from Nvidia inside three Tesla c1060 Computing Processors and one Quadro FX5800 (testing out Nvidia’s claim that GPUs can be used to make cheaper, faster supercomputers). The ESC 1000 also has 24GB of DDR3 (double data rate, third generation) 1333MHz DRAM and a 500G SATA II HD.

Sadly there is no word on the price of the ESC 1000, but somehow I doubt you would be able to run down and buy one at the local Best Buy.

Zealot (469 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).