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China Building a 100-petaflop Supercomputer Using Domestic Processors
concealment writes "As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed. Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018."
And, naturally, it's planned to use a domestically developed MIPS processor
Chinese technology has already gone much farther than you give them credit, and the natural tendency is for them to surpass stagnated US sooner or later. Considering how US has put in place so many impediments to innovation with the excuse of "helping innovation" that is just a matter of time.
And please, although the Chinese government is very corrupt, it is not more corrupt than US government or US corporations.
Why is it bad that DEC (a defunct company) can't profit from their imaginary property in a country that has no protection from or laws against such use. The US Government can also appropriate technology and materials from private corporations within their sovereign state without compensation.
DEC attempted to market their solution and failed miserably, they made their money back by selling it to Intel (so actually it's currently Intel's Imaginary Property). If someone else can improve upon their design (which was quite good actually especially in floating point operations) then I can only applaud their work. Just because it's the boogeyman-du-jour that's developing it doesn't make a difference to me.
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That old Alpha chip did about 5 GFLOPS with a single core on 666Mhz, so 16 of these at 1.1Ghz would go up to about the 140GFLOPS that are stated on the wikipedia on the ShenWei SW1600. Thats about twice as fast as an i7-930@4.2 Ghz.
So so much for decades old technology. It was just abondoned because there was to little market for it, but that doesn't mean it's bad stuf.
Have you ever used one of those things? They were amazing chips for their time, especially with their bus architecture. They were great for SMP usage.
AMD and Intel managed to get ahold of a lot of the developers and IP related to these chips, and wedged it into their systems. I'd be very surprised if you still couldn't find traces of it in their systems today. I know not long after AMD got their share, their SMP performance shot up massively, and when it comes to SMP use, they are still better at it than Intel (though, their per-core lack of performance, sadly makes up for this).
So, yeah, with a die shrink, I could see these being amazing for a multi-core behemoth, and competitive with anything extant on the market right now. The only reason we don't see these today, I suspect, is because Intel got most of the IP, and used it to make the Itanium, and the wouldn't produce a competitor for their pet pink elephant.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It was just abondoned because there was to little market for it,
No, it was abandoned because HP/Compaq ended up owning the Alpha and PA-RISC and Intel convinced them that they could lower costs by outsourcing their CPU design and use Itanium instead. There were still a lot of people who wanted to buy new Alphas, and they got stuck with Itaniums instead. The ones that weren't on VMS or NonStop just gave up and switched to commodity x86 and some open source *NIX.
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