If we were interested in building a bunch of real PCs out of existing
components for the sole purpose of GIMPS work, there are quite a few
corners that we could cut which would normally be unacceptable for a
someone's primary system. We could share a monochrome monitor among
several systems, give them plain-vanilla VGA cards and tiny hard drives,
and omit every irrelevant peripheral device. The most important
component is a fast processor.
But I hypothesize that there is one area (besides the processor) in
which a certain extravagance might be beneficial--the memory system. As
I understand it, Prime95 uses multi-megabyte arrays of data, and the
speed of access to them is a major limiting factor in performance. From
what I've heard, even a Xeon processor with a 2MB cache is not a huge
help.
And so I have an idea: would it be possible and feasible to build the
main memory from SRAM? I would expect this to give a bigger improvement
than most of the processor advances that are on the horizon, including
the Pentium III, and only 8 or 12 MB per system should be needed. Can
anyone comment on how much this would help, what it would cost, and
whether it is possible with existing motherboards?
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