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Cray Supercomputers to be Based on AMD Opterons
PsychicX writes "AMD and Cray have announced an agreement to base Cray supercomputers on AMD's Opteron line until the end of the decade, and to collaborate on Cray's 2006 proposal for Phase 3 of the federal government's DARPA HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) program. Cray already offers the XT3 and XD1 supercomputers based on Opteron."
Specialized computing hardware for supercomputers has always seemed like a fiscally bad choice. It'll be good to see what kinds of improvements we can see in research possibilities as supercomputing costs come down from using mass-marketed parts.
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This is really just a marketing play on AMD's part. Now they can sell you:
"The SAME CPU used in CRAY ***SUPERCOMPUTERS***, now available for your desktop!"
And some rube will buy one based on that statement.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
No, it didn't.
Can we have a "-1, Catch phrase" option, please? The old jokes are not even remotely funny anymore..srsly.
Will code a sig generator for food
Yes, actually.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
AMD has no incentive to change its server chip just to better suit the niche supercomputer market. It would only alter the Opteron to fit the server market, not the supercomputer market. The firm already has manufacturing bottlenecks; its production fabs are cramped as is. There are also problems with inventory. Why would AMD spend the money to create a chip that would benefit supercomputers and not servers? It would make sense only if AMD and Cray improved the tech in a way that would make the Opteron better suited to the server market as well, such as by improving the scalability of the technology.
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Wow, seems AMD *doubled* it's share of spots in the Top 500 list in *six months*. I bet Intel is ticked, and worried...this is very good PR for AMD.
Go AMD! Milk that NexGen core for all its worth, too bad you didn't invent it, you just bought it.
LOL! Intel fanboys don't have anything real to say these days, they have to resort to cheap ad-hominems. Don't worry, I'm sure someday Intel will come out with competitive chips again. Pretty sure, anyhow.
And as to AMD "just buying it", how would that relate to Intel getting so much Alpha technology and talent from it's deals with HP/Compaq/DEC?
It would be nice if you would start innovating one of these days.
Yeah, if AMD can produce better processors than Intel without innovating, just imagine what'll happen when it does innovate...! =)
If they think they'll make more money in the long run, all things considered, they'll do it.
Which is true only insomuch as the old-time reputation could not possibly exist today. That was the cold war, this is the post-coldwar era. The old cray was a mammoth beast with its own share of myopia, but a lot of technical tallent. This allowed a few really brilliant concepts, and a lot of clever implementation to power two decades of brilliant computers. That said, they were brilliant solutions for the era. Old-school cray systems were built in an era when doing fundamental pieces of math was still pretty difficult, and the government was willing to pay ten million dollars for a machine that was proficient at doing math, and many tens of millions for a machine that was really good at it.
The difficult problems in building computers has changed, and the financial climate around supercomputers has changed quite a lot. Among other things, CMOS finally became fast enough to put bipolar in its grave, single microprocessor workstations became powerful enough to do all but the hardest of scientific tasks, and the average price of high performance (not top 10 on the list, but still fast) computers has plummeted. To ask the new cray to be like the old cray would be foolish.
That said, New Cray is still offers impressive products. All of Cray's 3 product lines have much lower entry-prices than similar crays of the 90's. They all have more managable power/cooling/physical size characteristics. They make much greater use of industry standard Disks and networks, and also can be administered and programmed much more like any other unix computer. You program a New Cray more or less the same as other contemporary HPC systems.
When cdc introduced the 6600, the president of IBM complained to his staff aking (paraphrase) 'how has cdc managed to best IBM's fastest computer with a staff of just 14 engineers and 4 programmers?' Seymor Cray responded "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question." Because new Cray is tiny does not mean that it is not capable of making impressive innovations. Old Cray's Gorilla days were very wasteful, and not necessarily full of the best moments of innovation.
Now, if only they could put four X1e CPUs into an air-cooled, rack-mount server and charge a reasonable amount for it. I'd much rather have a handful of vector processors than a few dozen opterons, anyday.
Aren't you missing the point though? It's not that the AMD systems are prevailing on the merits of their amazing vector math (they aren't) - it's that they do a PRETTY good job of both vector and scalar math, but at the prices you can get them, your cost per computation is SIGNIFICANTLY lower then it would be with one of the massive vector systems.
The research / development arm of the organization I work for just got a 4000+ CPU XT3. Last I checked, they planned on using the PGI compiler for most stuff.
The continued big-name backing of AMD (e.g. Sun, Cray) makes me wonder how sweet a deal Apple must have gotten to go with Intel over AMD. :)
The parent poster needs to be reminded that a large chip manufacturer like Intel, IBM, and AMD makes much more than CPUs! They play a fundamental role in the design and system architecture of the machines built out of their chips. Interfaces like Hypertransport, PCI Express, and DDR are the work of these chip giants. To claim that changing the fundamental design of the CPUs has anything to do with the interaction of a supercomputer company and AMD is naive. Far more likely are changes in Hypertransport, interfaces to memory, or other bus-level projects that are more useful to a supercomputer vendor looking for the best possible overall system bandwidth anyway.
-Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. -Ben Franklin
Stock prices seldom reflect what the company is actually doing, and are more often driven by either the market in general or mindless "analysts" who wouldn't know what AMD does if a chip were to bite them in the bum.