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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-for-bugs-at-the-chip-buffet dept.

High Performance Computing (HPC) Chips – A Veritable Smorgasbord?

No this isn't about the song from Charlotte's Web or the Scandinavian predilection for open sandwiches; it's about the apparent newfound choice in the HPC CPU market.

For the first time since AMD's ill-fated launch of Bulldozer the answer to the question, 'Which CPU will be in my next HPC system?' doesn't have to be 'Whichever variety of Intel Xeon E5 they are selling when we procure'.

In fact, it's not just in the x86 market where there is now a genuine choice. Soon we will have at least two credible ARM v8 ISA CPUs (from Cavium and Qualcomm respectively) and IBM have gone all in on the Power architecture (having at one point in the last ten years had four competing HPC CPU lines – x86, Blue Gene, Power and Cell).

In fact, it may even be Intel that is left wondering which horse to back in the HPC CPU race with both Xeon lines looking insufficiently differentiated going forward. A symptom of this dilemma is the recent restructuring of the Xeon line along with associated pricing and feature segmentation.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:30PM (2 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:30PM (#582785) Homepage

    Kind of a tangent here, but many years ago before I had even dreamed of studying computer science I had found a Sparcstation 10 [wikipedia.org] in the dumpster. I took it in and plugged my VGA monitor into it and surprisingly it booted to a command line with no problems. I ended up throwing it back in the dumpster shortly afterward and now I'm kicking myself for that...could have at least sold it to one of you for 100-200 bucks on eBay.

    Would any of you have bought it?

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  • (Score: 2) by Post-Nihilist on Monday October 16 2017, @01:48AM (1 child)

    by Post-Nihilist (5672) on Monday October 16 2017, @01:48AM (#582866)

    Did it had it's original keyboard? If so I might have, Sun keyboards were great for all Unixes... Nowaday, i would not cause I have a 200$ mechanical RGB keyboard with 10 programmable keys and 3 in nvram profiles...

    --
    Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!