
A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe - vaksel
http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/06/02/a-look-inside-the-fastest-supercomputer-in-europe/
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khandekars
Processor: 32-bit PowerPC 450 at 850 MHz. The supercomputer has 294,912
processor cores. Instead of running it at a higher speed, they are quite
correctly exploiting the parallelism. It's a net win for performance and
energy efficiency. I guess that the desktops of the future will tend to follow
a similar trend.

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wmf
_I guess that the desktops of the future will tend to follow a similar trend._

They won't, because desktop software is quite different from HPC software.

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khandekars
I will like to believe that the Desktop software will move towards
parallelism, may not be to the same extent as of HPC, but in a similar
direction in the sense that it will certainly go away from strictly single
core approach. It won't be easy, e.g. none of the web browsers today fully
exploits all cores of a box. But, it will be fun to watch.

Off topic: I'm in your fan club, :) due to your "Hack the planet" blog
<http://wmf.editthispage.com> since Dec. 1999.

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wmf
The cost of finding all the single-thread bottlenecks and parallelizing them
is immense -- akin to the Manhattan Project -- and the payoff would be that
Intel and AMD could sell different (perhaps lower power) processors than they
do today. Why bother? We have processors that work perfectly well for desktop
software.

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khandekars
True. At the same time, we keep expecting more from our machines, fuelling
feature growth and consequential demand for faster processing mechanisms.

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wmf
Yes, so future apps may prefer to run on the Larrabee cores, but the fat cores
that old apps depend on cannot be removed.

