
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:
2009-09-23
Clock speed is just one parameter (think about the P4s and how they achieved very high clock speed by shortening each pipeline stage). Have you compared the transistor count, memory bandwidth and process technology used? Itaniums have only been competitive because they poured resources into it - large cache, high memory bandwidth and so on. I've heard recent ones are pretty good but I doubt even the yet-to-come Tukwila would surpass Nehalems by much, well, if at all. If you factor in the overall cost, it just doesn't make much sense unless you're talking about highend niche.
Edited 2009-09-23 14:56 UTC