No, it isn't B.S. (hope I'm not violating "SI Administrator Jeff"'s anal-retentive rules against using words like "B.S.")
The NEC machine uses 7 GFLOPS processors, which are about the current SOA for Power4, PowerPC, Pentium 4, Alpha, etc. processors. Or within a trivial factor of 2, at least.
Where the performance comes from is from the willingness to buy and link many thousands of them, filling hundreds of racks, in a couple of very large rooms.
Anyone willing to commit the $400 million that the "NEC Earth Computer" is said to have cost could have built up the machine. It doesn't use anything particularly novel.
Nor did the ASCI White machine now installed at LLNL.
More interesting, and more of a potential threat to traditional von Neumann architectures such as Intel, AMD, NEC, etc. use, are the "processor in memory" (PIM) designs IBM is said to be using for a new generation of machines far beyond ASCI White and NEC Earth Computer.
--Tim May |
