Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD

vincecate writes "Traditionally the key chips that have allowed companies to scale multiprocessors to large numbers have been proprietary. Some examples are the Cray SeaStar, SGI NUMAlink, HP sx1000, and the IBM X3/Hurricane. This proprietary paradigm is about to change to a more open one. Two companies have developed key chips for building large Opteron multiprocessors, and they will be commercial off-the-shelf parts. PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster. The other company is Newisys, which will soon release the Horus chip. This chip will make it possible to build 32 socket (64-core) shared memory Opteron systems."

Comments

Imagine a... nah, too easy.

[meringuoid]

Cheap shots about Gentoo and Doom 3 aside, this is cool to see. I imagine it warms the heart of a lot of us old AMD fanboys. Plus, with a bit of luck the extra volume will bring down the prices of the Athlon 64s we stick in our gaming boxen. Right?... Right?

... k, maybe not. Can't afford one anyway :-(

Re:How about 2560 Opterons?

[Vancorps]

Since the 286 days I've had both AMD and Intel and I gotta say, in those days there was very little difference between processors. Fast forward to today and I wonder if you've even look at AMDs offerings in the last 3 years. Video processing? I stream live dvd quality feeds using Opteron processors for a simple reason. Dual Xeon 2.8ghz server could make 2 high quality dvd streams with minimal frame drops. Powerful yes, now compare it to the dual Opteron 1.8ghz the lowest of the low end. I can do 4 streams with the same level of compression. In both scenarios I'm using the same Osprey 230 PCI-X cards.

So I'm a big curious what is so vastly superior? Are you using Intel compiled codecs on AMD machines when you did your testing? Did you even do any testing? I'll admit I had some trouble getting things running smoothly with the Opteron box but the end results speak for themselves; especially when you move over to the 64bit world with 64bit capture drivers the Opteron blows away anything Intel has put out to date. Of course Intel 64bit support is slow as all hell right now so I'm sure that will change in the near future.

While you may have been burnt by AMD I will stick with them for the time being until Intel shows some signs of turning around their product offerings. I'm still curious how a processor has gone bad though. In my experience once you get back the first 90 days its smooth sailing regardless of manufacturer. Only reason I can think a chip would die later in life would be from a PSU failure or some sort of disruption. I've seen that happen, never just seen a cpu die though. Always some other component causing it.

Of course this is getting off track from the article. The Opteron is very well suited for these large machines so I'll be curious how they perform in real environments like Oracle and DB2 setups. Opterons bandwidth improve the more processors you throw at it so it'll be intriguing to see the results.