IEEE Says Multicore is Bad News For Supercomputers

Posted by timothy on Friday December 5, 2008 @12:04AM from the unexpected-downsides dept.

Richard Kelleher writes "It seems the current design of multi-core processors is not good for the design of supercomputers. According to IEEE: 'Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico, have simulated future high-performance computers containing the 8-core, 16-core, and 32-core microprocessors that chip makers say are the future of the industry. The results are distressing. Because of limited memory bandwidth and memory-management schemes that are poorly suited to supercomputers, the performance of these machines would level off or even decline with more cores.'"

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Re:Well doh by stonemetal · 2008-12-05 00:54 · Score: 0, Redundant

Its not like multi-processor systems where each cpu gets its own ram.
While I agree there are limits, AMD's NUMA arch. means that every CPU does in fact get its own ram. It is each core on that one chip that doesn't get its own ram.