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IBM Showcases Extreme Graphics Capable Blade/Thin Client Computing

Thursday, 24 May 2007 by Michel Roth

I read this in an article at Techworld.com. It's about having a Blade PC in your datacenter and accessing it via your Thin Client. In this combo by IBM you are able to do extreme graphics. It does not use RDP (which makes sense) but a proprietary protocol. Nevertheless, at a minimum of $2,500 to $3,000 a pop it's seems very expensive, just to get decent video performance. This kind of defeats some of the purposes of going to Server Based Computing ...

"IBM is promising high performance 3D graphics from a new, blade-format workstation that's remotely accessed by a thin client. Thin clients, whether in this format or as virtual machines, have previously been unable to reproduce 3D graphics or real-time video for remote viewing with the performance of a fat client workstation.

The HC10, essentially a headless PC in a blade server format, fits into IBM's BladeCenter chassis and offers what IBM Fellow Dr. Tom Bradicich described as a high-end workstation experience. The thin client to which the HC10 connects is the TC10, made by IBM partner Devon IT. At the moment, only the TC10 contains the requisite hardware to decompress the graphics stream, although Bradicich said that the proprietary protocol is before the VESA video standards committee and is expected to be published by the end of 2007. Bradicich said the remote desktop technology used by the device is unrelated to RDP, the established standard.

The bandwidth consumed by the system will allow several users to share a 100Mbit/sec Ethernet pipe, according to Bradicich, who said that a 3D application would consume about 20-30Mbit/sec. He said that less intensive applications might use only 10 per cent of that.

Pricing won't be released until 5 June, but Bradicich said it would be "quite competitive"; our guess is somewhere around $2,500-$3,000, on top of which customers will need a BladeCenter chassis and associated management modules."

Read the whole article here.