Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Sep 2006 18:23 UTC
IBM has won a bid to build a supercomputer called Roadrunner that will include not just conventional Opteron chips but also the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation. The supercomputer, for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will be the world's fastest machine and is designed to sustain a performance level of a 'petaflop', or 1 quadrillion calculations per second, said US Senator Pete Domenici earlier this year. I'd like to play Solitaire on that.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Right. And IBM is using these "slow chips" to handle the logic computations in this supercomputer, because a "fast chip", like the Cell, isn't any good at it.
Seriously, stream processors are for very niche applications. They might be ideal for accelerating the inner loops of some calculation, but for the stuff most of the market uses, massively OOO general-purpose cores rule.
Indeed, comparing the chips made by the "big chip makers" to stream processors is really pointless. It's comparing a Mack truck to a Lotus Elise. They're designed completely differently, because they're designed for completely different jobs. That's why you have something like this supercomputer --- a hybrid that leverages the strengths of each chip.