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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."
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.