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."

Comments

Highlights as per Top500 site

[gupg]

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.

Re:So?

[hairyfeet]

Well I'd say its also news as many of the guys here are in charge of purchases and this shows AMD still has some competitive server offerings, and as someone who remembers what it was like when there was only Intel (crazy ass pricing, lousy chips, insane motherboard costs, etc) having competition is VERY important!

I'd add these gains were done in spite of Intel doing everything but setting the AMD factories on fire trying to kill AMD. They rigged their compiler (and still are BTW) to put out shit code if it runs on an AMD CPU, they bribed the OEMs so much that there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell saw were Intel kickbacks, and Toshiba said their kickbacks were so generous they were "like cocaine" to the OEMs.

So I'd say that AMD making gains despite Intel doing everything but breaking their employee's kneecaps just shows they still have some competitive spirit. I personally have switched my shop to AMD only after finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging and my customers couldn't be happier. 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.

So I'm personally glad for TFA, as it shows me they have competitive server chips to go with their excellent desktop and notebook lines. And frankly you should be happy too as real free market competition is good for everyone. or do you honestly think Intel would have a chip that costs less than $1000 if it weren't for AMD?