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AMD Gains In the TOP500 List
MojoKid writes "AMD recently announced its share of the TOP500 supercomputer list has grown 15 percent in the past six months. The company credits industry trends, upgrade paths, and competitive pricing for the increase. Of the 68 Opteron-based systems on the list, more than half of them use the Opteron 6100 series processors. The inflection point was marked by AMD's launch of their Magny-Cours architecture more than a year ago and includes the twelve-core Opteron 6180 SE at 2.5GHz at one end and two low-power parts at the other. Magny-Cours adoption is important. Companies typically don't upgrade HPC clusters with new CPUs, but AMD is billing their next-gen Interlagos architecture as a drop-in option for Magny-Cours. As such, it'll offer up to 2x the cores as well as equal-to or faster clock speeds."
Why is it newsworthy when one company goes up or down a random list?
I guess if you are a stockholder, but other than that I can't see caring.
Congratulations, AMD. You have just added 9 more computers to the TOP500 list. A whopping 14% of the TOP500 list is now AMD!! I think AMD is still sore at Intel for it's Core 2 Duo and Core i3/5/7 processors.
That's hardly a "random list". And this is a site about technology. Do you think it would be irrelevant for a site about gaming consoles to mention that the Kinect increased the Xbox's share of exercise games (or whatever) ?
Supercomputing designs are a rather good real-world benchmark of CPUs, because they take into account cost, density, ease of deployment, etc..
More interesting than the share of the top 500 list, though, is the fact that AMD holds the #3 spot, ahead of Intel (whose first system comes in at #4) and both are behind a GPU-based system (using Nvidia Tesla chips, at #2). This is probably a good indicator of things to come, and explains why AMD is betting so heavily on integrating the GPU into its overall system architecture, and why Intel has finally started serious work on GPUs.
#1, by the way, is held by a SPARC system.
The top500 site has its own take on highlights:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2011/06/press-release
- The two Chinese systems at No. 2 and No. 4 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation, and a total of 19 systems on the list are using GPU technology.
- China keeps increasing its number of systems and is now up to 62, making it clearly the No. 2 country as a user of HPC, ahead of Germany, UK, Japan and France.
- Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (77.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list strongly with 169 systems, compared with 56 in the last list.
- Quad-core processors are used in 46.2 percent of the systems, while already 42.4 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
- Cray defended the No. 2 spot in market share by total against Fujitsu, but IBM stays well ahead of either. Cray’s XT system series remains very popular for big research customers, with three systems in the TOP 10 (one new and two previously listed).
In my opinion, the newest & most important trend in high performance computing is the advent of accelerators like GPUs.
The supercomputer I use daily is one of these new AMD based ones in the TOP500. It is a sweet machine. My software (custom engineering simulation written in C++) scales perfectly on it all the way out to over 10,000 cores.
The memory architecture is really excellent as well. With our old Intel based cluster we wouldn't load up every core on the node because of memory contention. But hyper-transport with NUMA completely negates the need to do that. We routinely fully load the nodes on the new machine without any trouble at all.
If AMD keeps it up they are going to find a lot of business in the high-end computing segment.
But does it matter?
Excuse my insolence to the goddess of inconsequence, but who cares about supercomputer hardware or OSs and other such arbitrary Top500 lists?
Not to say there aren't cool stuff to talk about when it comes to supercomputers. Like for example, brilliant new ideas to parallelize things and clever ways to write distributed systems, new solutions to problems that could only be solved synchronously, interesting new applications for such systems etc etc. Whether they prefer to use Intel or AMD is not very exciting news, and tbh sounds like corporate marketing.
IMHO.
But when are those 28nm CPUs coming out?
Mostly for your ATI video cards. The heat output of your 6000 series is incredible. Love the industrial fan though.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Any proof of these claims of compiler tampering? So why would you be using an intel compiler on AMD cpus? Does AMD not write one? Your third paragraph reads like an advertisement,
"Their netbooks and laptops all have smooth video and are easy to hook to a TV via HDMI thanks to the Radeon IGPs, their desktops are likewise great with smooth 1080p video and hardware acceleration of all the major formats as well as hardware transcoding, their triples and quads make a great centerpiece for a good cheap media box or HTPC, all in all they make a great consumer box that will do all your average person will ever want to do at a price they can easily afford without breaking the bank."
Seriously who talks like that besides maybe an AMD employee?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Is we need to look at finding a new benchmark perhaps for supercomputer. Maybe two or three different kinds, depending on the kinds of thing you want.
The reason is that while GPUs are great, they are limited. We don't use them for everything for good reason. So if you have the kind of problem GPUs are good at, and linpack happens to be one of them these days, then wonderful. They are a great way to go in terms of performance/dollar and performance/watt. However if you don't, then they are not useful and you need to use CPUs.
Thus there are reasons to have the "slower" CPU based supercomputers because for some things, they are not slower at all.
For example one problem linpack has is it doesn't test interconnect speed very well. You can break the problem down in to small pieces and run it on the nodes quite well. Now that's wonderful, but not all problems are like that. Some do heavy cross node memory access and linpack doesn't show that.
That is an area GPUs fall down in. For example a Tesla M2090 has 177GB/sec of memory bandwidth to its onboard 6GB of RAM. Nice. However it only has 8GB/sec of bandwidth back to any system memory since it is on a PCIe 2.1 16x slot and that is all the bandwidth that has. Well that means things slow down a TON if you have to go off of the included RAM, never mind to RAM in another system.
So for some things, and linpack is one, that you can divide down and not have a ton of access between nodes, then wonderful, the GPUs are good. But we should have a benchmark that tests other situations too. Part of the reason why someone may buy a supercomputer instead of just a cluster is the need for high interconnect speed.
My biggiest issue is I am VERY VERY impatient when it comes to computers and I can't find anything from AMD that even comes CLOSE to my current i7 2600K @ 5Ghz. Not even a mb/cpu(s)/memory costing 3 times as much can touch this thing in most everyday things I do such as read/program/play games/photoshop/repeat. I finally, a few weeks ago, broke down and gave them another chance and built "my" 1st amd rig in like I said about 4 or so years and whilst it's fine for the money [it's a Phenom II X4 955 Black, water cooled, overclocked to 4.2Ghz with 4 gigs DDR3 @ 1333]. it's still much slower than the i5 I built around the same time [i5 750 @ 3.4Ghz, and 12 gigs DDR3 @1328 air cooled] and both cost about the same in parts, yet the i5 SMOKES the 955 even at 800Mhz less per core. So dollar for dollar you're still "faster" with intel and I Like fast. I pay well for fast. IF Amd was faster I'd be using them right now but they don't have ANYTHING to offer me except the HD 6990 I have in here but that's still ATI in my minds eye.
AMD will need to pull a major magic rabbit out thier hats on this upcoming bulldozer [which does seem to have intel worried as they are delaying the x78 chipset and subsiquent LGA2011 cpu's and boards until AMD reviels thier hand]. Smart on thier part I guess, sucks on mine cause I couldn't wait and went with the flakey p67 but hey in a couple of months I'll have a fairly cheap motherboard/cpu combo for sale :)
i just don't see it.
This Top500 comes in handy after these:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/6/24/amd-insiders-speak-out-bapco-exit-is-an-excuse-for-poor-bulldozer-performance.aspx
Following our coverage on AMD's exit from BAPCo and blog post made by Nigel Dessau, we got a surprising call from the person at the heart of AMD which we had to check out. After the end of an eye opening conversation, we started calling our sources in order to confirm if the claims made by an obviously disappointed engineer hold any substance. We talked to our usual sources inside the company, as well as with a number of sources at their key partners and customers. The odd part was that all of our contacts said the same thing - the story checks out. Thus, we bring you the modestly edited version of our conversation, filed with comments.
AMD's BAPCo Exit is a Smokescreen
First and foremost, we started the discussion over the blog Nigel Dessau, AMD's Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer wrote, stating clear reasons why AMD decided to leave the BAPCo and why AMD considers SYSmark 2012 an invalid benchmark.
"When I read Nigel's blog and saw the press release from BAPCo it made me sick because our CMO talks about transparency and honesty and it's all smoke and mirrors. At the end of the day, we actively had internal teams and external organizations hired to promote/discredit SYSmark. Not because it was inaccurate, but because it is accurate. Back in the original Athlon 64 and Opteron days, when we were winning in SYSmark we were heavily promoting it in the public sector, who in turn used it as a benchmark on which they based many of their purchases on. It was us who actually got BAPCo and SYSmark inside several government tenders to win orders measured in tens of thousands of systems. SYSmark was used to show how our K8 processors were beating Intel's NetBurst."
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/computers/why-did-amd-quit-bapco-board-poor-bulldozer-performance-on-sysmark-2012-or-intel-bias/6230
The latest dust-up in the AMD-versus-Intel never-ending conflict concerns BAPCo, a consortium of tech companies that releases a set of benchmarks, including, most importantly, SYSmark. This week, AMD quit the BAPCo board, and speculation over why has run rampant ever since.
Officially, AMD claims that the latest version of SYSmark, the just-released SYSmark 2012, fails to keep up with current computing trends and ignores the increasing role the GPU plays in computing tasks. Since AMD is trying to differentiate itself from Intel by boosting the GPU in its new chip designs, SYSmark’s reliance on just the CPU, in AMD’s opinion, doesn’t reflect everyday computing performance.
That’s the official word. But conspiracy theorists think there’s more to the story than just that. Most sensationally, Bright Side of News has run a piece with startling claims from “unnamed sources,” most notably that AMD decided to pull out of BAPCo because its forthcoming Bulldozer chips delivered underwhelming performance on SYSmark 2012, and that the company has spent resources toward surreptitiously undermining BAPCo through negative PR campaigns. According to the piece, AMD’s paranoia about SYSmark is related to the benchmark’s role in securing government contracts and the chip company’s fear that it won’t win new contracts with poor SYSmark 2012 results.
Coincidence?
Strange that the reporters chose to miss out on both VIA's and nVidia's departures.
Food for yet another level of conspiracy theories! :)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4464/amd-resigns-from-bapco-over-sysmark12-concerns
"Update: AMD Resigns from BAPCo Over SYSmark 2012 Concerns; NVIDIA & VIA Also Leave, BAPCo Responds"