
More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked possible that its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time. As a result, the chipmaker made an unusual move by paying Hewlett-Packard $100,000 to evaluate
building the system using its PA-RISC processors in the machine, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.
Member since:
2005-07-24
Well, that was the problem, wasn't it? The Titanic wasn't a bad ship. It hit an iceberg and sank. The Itanic also hit an iceberg and sank. The difference being that plenty of people saw the iceberg that Itanic was heading for, and Intel still just plowed into it.
Maybe compilers today do have the smarts necessary to have averted that collision years ago. And maybe modern technology could have averted Titanic's own collision. (For that matter, 1912 technology could have done so, if only <fill in the blank>. But does it really matter today?