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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dougSF30 who wrote (196973)	5/15/2006 10:49:37 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Doug, if they're simply using clusters of 2-Socket systems, new Woodcrest machines should have higher performance than Opteron. Woodcrest will likely lead in some apps and trail in others, once memory accesses (cache misses) predominate. If the Opteron memory controller has 2 independent channels, 4 of them in 2 socket system, it may benefit some of the workloads. Overall, Woodcrest is more likely to lead, if it launches at 3 GHz and and Opteron is below 3 GHz. Being limited to 2 sockets - or switching to a different ISA if the customer needs more - is not exactly great sales proposition, but beggars can't be chosers. I wonder though how much money SGI is planning on making on the lowest end, commodity end of the HPC spectrum, and what SGI think its advantage will be vs. HP or Dell. Joe

To: dougSF30 who wrote (196973)	5/16/2006 8:22:17 AM
From: fastpathguru	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

4-way Opterons should beat 2x2-way Woodcrest in performance and even more so in performance/$. In addition, AMD has the commodity-accelerator ace up its sleeve. SGI's product will be competing with this: biz.yahoo.com Preliminary testing performed at Tokyo Tech clearly demonstrated Sun's ability to deliver the fastest supercomputer outside the United States as measured by sustained performance using the industry standard Linpack Benchmark. "This is truly an unprecedented achievement, given that TSUBAME was installed in just three weeks, and it has only been a month since the it went into production," said Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor in charge of Research Infrastructure at Global Scientific Information and Computing Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology. "And we have only begun to understand the true capability of TSUBAME. We expect further advances in performance with utilization of acceleration, as well as to exploit the other superior aspects of the system, such as very large memory, fat node shared memory architecture with fast interconnect, ultra fast & reliable storage, and most importantly, x86 compatibility with desktop environments." Expected to be in the top 10 supercomputers in the world, and it hasn't even started flexing its Clearspeed accelerator muscles yet. fpg