Everyone"s favourite shouty TV star, Sir Alan "you"re fired!" Sugar unveiled a supercomputer at Queen Mary, University of London this morning.
Sugar cajoles wannabe entrepreneurs on BBC1"s The Apprentice and is founder of computer maker Amstrad.
But the hat he wore today was the one of chairman at Viglen, the company that developed the high performance computer (HPC) cluster in partnership with Queen Mary, University of London. The university has so far coughed up around £650,000 to pay for the new system.
The e-Science HPC cluster will run on Linux and be powered by AMD"s 284 dual processor, dual core nodes which might be seen by some as a bold move away from long-term Viglen partners Microsoft and Intel.
El Reg asked why Viglen had chosen AMD over Intel, and Sugar said "it"s simply a commercial thing" and that he was glad to see "healthy competition" between the two, unlike Microsoft"s dominance of the software market.
"Hardware becomes an irrelevance as far as the business model is concerned...hacking it out on price is long gone, now we have to compete over who offers the best service."