25th TOP500 List Released 274
Chris Vaughan writes "The 25th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers was released today (June 22, 2005) at the 20th International Supercomputing Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg Germany. The No. 1 position was again claimed by the previously mentioned BlueGene/L System. At present, IBM and Hewlett-Packard sell the bulk of systems at all performance levels of the TOP500. The U.S is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 294 of the 500 systems installed there (up from 267 six months ago)."
All this computing power (Score:1, Insightful)
Computers are pretty dumb. Humans are amazingly smart.
Re:Obvious Link? (Score:4, Insightful)
PowerPC is _based_ on POWER. The G5 is basically a modified and scaled down POWER 4 chip.
Apple's got other concerns rather than just raw computing power, and they don't need the features that allow you to have more than 4 or so processors in one system. POWER itself isn't designed for small applications - engineering workstations is about as low end as it gets.
It does suck though. PPC's a nice platform.
Re:surprsing to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is that suprising in any way? At one time, Ford was synonymous with cars, but today have news of Ford laying off managers. IBM used to be synonymous with the desktop PC, but with the sale of their laptop division are now completely out of the market. Sony Walkman was synonymous with portable music, but now everyone has an iPod.
Cray is just another company that had a great product for a while, but couldn't keep innovating and couldn't keep up when the competition joined the market. Nothing at all suprising about it, it happens all the time.
Re:surprsing to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Cray still makes some of the fastest supercomputers around. They do not, however, make supercomputing clusters, which this list includes.
So you're comparing rather different things. And it's an important difference since not all computing tasks can be parallelized.