Comments on: AMD Fellow: acceleration makes more sense than manycore

By: John West

John West — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:03:43 +0000

Joe – thanks! I haven’t looked into it yet, but I’ll explore the link you sent along.

By: Joe Quinlan

Joe Quinlan — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:53:49 +0000

John, this is a good article. Have you thought of trying to get insidehpc.com included as a Google News source? I think more and more people are relying on targeted RSS feeds from Google News, so this might increase your readership. An interesting web page on this subject is at…

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/become_google_news_gnews_source.html

By: John Leidel

John Leidel — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:15:51 +0000

I would also have to agree with John West and Chuck Moore. It simply makes more sense to place a series of operations on a portion of the compute platform that is the most efficient for *those* operations [ie, scalar v. vector]. I don’t understand the persuasion behind cramming more cores in the same footprint in order to achieve “more scalar flops/square inch.” Granted, this mantra make hold true for the enterprise server market. “I want to run more concurrent copies of X on my server” is driving this to some extent.
The only issue I have with Moore’s overarching statements is in regard to software. I honestly believe that both multi-core and hybrid compute solutions have and will continue to have a software problem if we don’t stop and think critically about the issues. Ultimately, users will not accept the the current state of the market in hybrid computing: use my external cross compiler and API to achieve speedup. They will also not accept the fact that OpenMP will solve all their problems on multi-core platforms.

By: seb

seb — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:53:20 +0000

I’m not smart enough to predict what the future will be and therefore I can not say if the many core approach will succeed or not.

But one point I’m agree with C. Moore is on the Cell, the weakest part of the Cell is the PPU, this is a nightmare, I think it was good in 2004 but now in 2008 it is a big bottleneck.

And it is not a detail that IBM RoadRunner use a important number of Opterons I think in this way they will probably bypass the PPU for most of the computations.