Intel to release grand HPC vision

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According to Pat Gelsinger, as reported by The Register, Intel will release its grand HPC vision targeting Petascale at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco later this year.

Whilst Intel chips (mostly Xeon family) dominate the Top500 list, the most demanding supercomputers still tend to be custom designs, and in many cases using non-Intel chips. Looking to the next generation of supercomputers, according to The Register, Sun, IBM and Cray are all working on supercomputer designs that should result in a performance leap that places their hardware one generation ahead of rival boxes. Intel doesn’t fit into any of these plans with Sun’s system running on its own Rock chips, Cray’s running on Opterons and IBM’s running on the Power7 chip. Gelsinger hints to The Register that Intel have plans to address this situation. No details were given by Gelsinger.

One might speculate on three possibilities: (a) Intel are trying some clever marketing ‘anticipation’ spin on their standard product roadmap; (b) Intel have been working on a top-secret HPC wonder product that they will announce soon; (c) Intel are using (a) to test the water to see if they should invest in (b). Or if we are really going to speculate, perhaps

Comments

  1. Perhaps *what*? Don’t leave us hanging like that!

  2. Sorry, but that was a deliberate ending! I could have speculated more, but

    😉

  3. Alright, I’ll stop the hanging endings now. The problem is that I have a day job that is close to some of this stuff, so I tend to avoid writing too much speculation about these stories to make sure I don’t cross any legal lines. Just enough speculation for fun.