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AMD Gains In the TOP500 List

Posted by timothy on from the included-chart-awesome dept.

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."

3 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. My Company Contributed to This by friedmud · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:So? by MacTO · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, it is of interest to people who are interested in supercomputers.

    People who develop software for those beasts like to know how things are changing. They may not need to know the intimate details since compilers and libraries will handle most of that, but they may want to throw together a small cluster to test emerging technologies. (This is particularly true in recent years since small clusters based upon AMD/Intel CPUs and AMD/Nvidia GPUs are within reach of individuals.)

    Stockholders though couldn't care less. The number of units is too small and the prestige counts for nothing unless it translates into sales in other markets.

  3. Re:some proof would be nice by godrik · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Any proof of these claims of compiler tampering?"

    This is a well known issue with the intel compiler which has been fixed since. The story is told on wikipedia in the criticism section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler

    The problem is so well known, that people wrote software to patch the code produced by the intel compiler to make it work properly on AMD processors such as http://code.google.com/p/patch-authenticamd/

    "So why would you be using an intel compiler on AMD cpus?"

    One of the interest in using the x86 instruction set is to be binary compatible so that you can use the code generated by any compiler. The intel compiler is a very good compiler, why not use it ? VIA also produces x86 processors you can use the binaries generated by the intel compiler on it. These technologies are designed to be compatible.

    "Does AMD not write one?"

    AMD contributes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open64 and to GCC.

    "Your third paragraph reads like an advertisement,"

    I agree on that one.