More on Intel and Cray at HPCwire

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Since HPCwire relaunched its web site over the weekend they’ve now got continuous feature stories. This one by Michael Feldman on the Intel/Cray relationship is a good one.

Cray logoIntel is not talking about any specific microprocessor product line for the Cray systems, since it’s not on the chipmaker’s public roadmap yet. But it’s likely to be an Intel Architecture (IA) processor with a lot more than eight cores — something equivalent to a manycore Xeon. Since the company has already demonstrated a non-IA 80-core chip that achieves over one teraflop, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think it has plans for a commercial manycore Xeon on the drawing board, at say 22nm. Intel is also looking to extend the work it’s done with its multithreading tools and compiler technology into a manycore framework. While all this technology will be directly applicable to Cray supercomputing, Intel is also looking to apply the resulting products to lower end HPC and mainstream enterprise systems.

Comments

  1. I keep hearing about this 80 core Terachip that Intel has made. Now, while I was at the Intel Developer Forum 2 years ago they had this same chip there and were bragging up and down about it in the marketing speals.

    After the talks and intros I was wandering around and ended up speaking to an Intel guy that had a really neat bread boarded system set up. I inquired as to what it was. It was a mock up to test different theories on how to get the 80 cores to share cache and/or talk. At the time the chip had no communications or cache. Just 80 chips on a die.

    Uhm. Wait a minute. You brag about an 80 core chip with a theoretical speed of a Teraflop and then you don’t even know how to get the processors to talk to each other?

    Not sure how much progress they’ve made. But when I saw it, contrary to marketing swag, it was a LONG ways away from being anything but a chunk of silicon.