There are some companies in the world that aim purely at the upper end of the pay scale. Denon has just released their new DVD-A1UD which costs a staggering $5,879, a price that us debt ridden unemployed mortals can only gape at.

So what does it actually do? Well, it can play Blu-ray discs, SACDs, CDs, DVD-Audio, and DVD-Video. This is Denon’s first Profile 2.0 Ready (BD Live) Blu-ray DVD player and it supports the HDMI 1.3 spec. It can also upscale non-HD sources and can convert signals so that they properly fit 16:9 screens without black bars or distortion. And lets face it, if you can spend this much you definitely have a widescreen TV.

Supercomputers are great, in fact even the name is great: conjuring images of CPUs in red capes flying to the help of damsels in distress. However, in the real world they are hundreds of cabinets stuffed full of computer stuff and do in fact loo incredibly dull. The opposite can be said of what they actually do as they push the boundaries of what is capable using solely 0s and 1s to solve complex calculations, help define new theorem, and play Crysis on full graphics.

Yet, as with everything in this world, it has become a competition to have the fastest computer and this has been going on since computers began; in fact, even Romans competed over abacus skills. In June, the Roadrunner which was built by IBM, became the fastest computer ever achieving a sustained speed of 1.026 petaflops.

However there could be a new leader on the Top 500 list which is compiled by computer experts and is to be updated this week in a supercomputing conference in Austin. This is Cray’s Jaguar XT, which claims to have reached 1.64 petaflops, a massive increase on its probable predecessor and is set to gain this prestigious honor. It runs Linux and has a massive 362TB of memory which is spread out over its 284 cabinets, each of which holding 192 quad-core AMD Opteron chips.