No price? I'm looking for an extra Linux system to develop on.

This is kind of pointless without commensurate memory bandwidth. Those CPUs are just going to be waiting around doing nothing.

That's why Power6 has enormous memory bandwidth (~50 GB/s theoretical).

The theoretical processor bandwidth is one thing; the actual throughput on motherboards with existing slow memory chips (DDR2-667 according to the specs page) is quite a different matter.

This becomes a pretty big deal when you have that many cores all hammering on it at once. Divide by 32...

Sure, so maybe in reality you only get ~30 GB/s/socket, which is 15 GB/s/core. That's a lot more bandwidth than other systems have.

Unfortunately the limit is going to be in the chipsets for that DDR2-667 RAM. PC2 5300 -- that is not a wide bus, 5.3 GB/s. That's the bottleneck.