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Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD

Posted by Hemos on from the opening-up-the-big-guns dept.

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."

4 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Big Iron? Uhhh... by kevin_conaway · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ehh, maybe. Normally "Big Iron" is associated with IBM but according to Wikipedia, the submitter is correct in using the term.

  2. Re:Big Iron? Uhhh... by BJZQ8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think this represents a fundamental shift in what "big iron" of the future will be. Instead of a few ultra-reliable, ultra-expensive processors, we will use masses of somewhat-reliable, cheap processors. The 64-processor clusters are just the beginning. Sony/IBM's Cell is a step in that direction; lots of little processors, rather than one big one. Big Iron is just what you make of it, after all, and ultra-reliability in practice doesn't have to mean an archaic architecture in design.

  3. god damnit by Douglas+Simmons · · Score: 5, Funny

    You kids, with your ultrasparc risc processing synchronous hypermultithreading vax/vms redbox pbx mumbo jumbo and your Ska music. For Christ's sake, cut the cotton-pickin' bullshit and tell me which stocks to buy and which to short. Oh and that AMD "capturing" the retail market tip the other day? Thanks for costing me six thousand dollars, my wallet was too thick and giving me a bad back. Christ.

  4. Re:Is 32 by nganju · · Score: 5, Funny


    For this context, 32 is plenty large. Large is relative. If you ask me how many grains of rice I ate last night, 100 would be a small number. If you ask the average slashdotter how many women he's dated, 1 is a huge number.

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    There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,