
Top 500 supercomputers by processor family - mceachen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg
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AWildC182
Can I just point out how much I hate those sand charts? You can only tell what
the bottom most variable is doing. How big is the AMD segment when intel was
rapidly rising? You can't tell because slope hides line width. Want to know
the trajectory of the other small players? Too bad.

Don't use sand charts kids.

~~~
nessus42
_> Don't use sand charts kids._

And what would you use as an alternative? It would take a LOT of bars to
display this information during the 90s as a grouped bar chart.

~~~
marcosdumay
> And what would you use as an alternative?

Non-cumulative line charts. As usually is the answer to that question.

As a bonus, you can break line charts by line, and you can zoom parts of it.

~~~
nessus42
_> Non-cumulative line charts._

I suppose. But a chart with 23 different lines is quite difficult to read in
my experience.

I.e., visually distinguishing that many lines from each other is not easy.

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marcosdumay
A chart with 23 different series is hard to read in any format. That's why
being able to break it down by line is good.

~~~
nessus42
I can see all 23 trends in the sand chart at least. 23 lines on a line chart
would be nothing but visual noise to me. I can barely parse the line charts on
TIOBE which have only 10 lines.

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erichurkman
Any Wikipedia engineers here? Being linked, on desktop, to this file
represents an exercise in futility.

I want to read the full article we were linked to. My click targets, in order:

'x' \- 'x' closes things. Can I close this modal to see the full page? No, it
closes and redirects back to this page on HN.

'more details'? No, it brings me to a details page about the graph image.
Cool, it's used on some other pages. Useless as a reader.

'black space' around the image? Not a clickable target, why would I click
there?

Can I zoom in? No, the image auto-resizes but the image viewer chrome zooms in
— making the image smaller??

Am I just a bad Wikipedia user?

~~~
rm999
Agreed, I went through a similar flow.

Direct link to the image:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Pr...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg/2560px-
Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg.png)

Article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500)

~~~
bscphil
The linked article was actually
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer)

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3JPLW
This is missing a big portion of the picture: GPUs and other heterogeneously
attached accelerators.

~~~
markandrewj
For more detailed information visit
[https://www.top500.org/](https://www.top500.org/) instead of the wikipedia
article.

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voldacar
I wonder if the x86 dominance has declined slightly since 2015 - I know the #1
supercomputer is currently a POWER machine, and there have been some Chinese
supercomputers that use their own manycore cpus with what I think is a MIPS-
inspired ISA

~~~
einpoklum
It has begun to, in favor of AMD64 - with the Epyc processors which appeared
in mid-2017:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyc)

they've been generally competitive (probably much more so when you factor
price in). Now, with Rome having come out, their market share is supposedly
increasing quite rapidly, since apparently it trounces Intel's Xeon offerings.

~~~
delish
GP said "x86 dominance" not Intel x86 dominance, for what it's worth. AMD64 is
x86-64.

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einpoklum
Note that statistics tend to be different if you focus on the top 10 or top 5
systems (not represented in the linked chart).

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tomc1985
That color scheme makes my eyes bleed. Whoever thought black-on-dark-blue was
a good choice?

I'm viewing this on a 99% sRGB screen and none of the dark blue boxes in the
key are discernable

~~~
bscphil
Anecdata, but I have a calibrated screen with about 95% AdobeRGB coverage, and
the dark boxes and lines are very clearly distinguishable. Is your screen
calibrated? Is something off with your contrast setting? Maybe a very bright
backlight ruins the contrast ratio at the darker end?

(I agree, however, that it's not a very attractive color scheme, and not a
terribly informative graph anyway. A simple X-Y plot would be better.)

~~~
tomc1985
These screens are factory calibrated (supposedly, but they included a
colorimeter report in the box) and they're all consistent several years later
so I'm guessing so. Maybe its gamma? Or maybe you're on OSX? (IIRC apple
devices use gamma 2.2 by default and Windows does 1.8? I think?) Our
difference could totally be because of default gamma.

~~~
bscphil
I'm on Linux, and my gamma is calibrated to 2.2. 1.8 sounds way too low, I
think! sRGB is roughly a 2.2 gamma curve, and a lot of professional media is
done for screens expected to have a gamma of 2.4.

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mproud
Do you think ARM will ever make it in this list?

~~~
dagw
Given that the future of at least a subset of HPC is spreading out super
parallel calculation to lots of GPUs via fast interconnects, it is certainly
conceivable that ARM based systems can do that as well as x86 system.

