Furthermore, and if you have the budget, if you want to run server farm or want to really number crunch your nobel prize winning theorem then buy dozens of modules that stack on top of each other and from side to side!
So this can easily be illustrated by you in photoshop I'm sure. Can you do that for us? Even more so (if you have the time) can you also design some smaller units that can also attach itself to the main modules like the jigsaw puzzle I suggested? The smaller modules can be specialized for memory or storage or even processing units. That way a customer can build an incredibly powerful and near infinitely customizable system if he/she had the budget and the need. Or, one can buy one simple module....or a few....for their modest computing needs.
Darn - should have seen this potential connection earlier
My take is that something like this could very well be useful in the HPC market, with the view that Snow Leopard ushers in the capabilities to really use this sort of discrete buildable system -
So this is a punt, but the "brick" is an analogy for how you are able to build a system with multiple bricks. Snow Leopard is known to be pushing for multi-core, multi-processor improvements (Grand Central etc.). But why stop there? Why couldn't Snow Leopard Server edition do the same over both XServes, and also Mac clusters, be it Mac minis, Mac Pros etc.
One of the puzzles i've been chewing on is that Snow Leopard, by going 64-bit, will have huge maximum potential Hard drive, Memory, and CPU/core limitations. If you really wanted to crunch numbers, potentially, the improvements upcoming could really help. The "brick" could be as a rack mountable XServe style unit. Brick does connotate physical proximity, but could just mean being able to use them together easily to form a larger system.
The concept of being able to "hive mind" multiple macs easily, for computing power is an interesting concept. Whether it would take off is another thing, but Apple might be close to the forefront next year in bringing in improvements to both business and consumers from multi-core CPUs, and multi-processor units (e.g. 2 CPU socket XServes on Nehalem lets say).
As mentioned - an Xserve would need risers, to actually even contemplate putting in a small percentage of RAM that the system could take. If there was a way to bolt on Memory, HD, graphics cards (GPU for the SL) sub components - because if Apple did want to let people rip making their own mega systems, they'd need a way to add all this kit on. A normal mainboard wouldn't cut it.
