Fujitsu Announces 16-core SPARC64 IXfx (and the Supercomputer It Powers)

First time accepted submitter A12m0v writes with a link to Fujitsu's announcement of its next generation of supercomputer, from which he pastes: "PRIMEHPC FX10 runs on the newly-developed SPARC64 IXfx processors, which offer a very significant boost in performance over the SPARC64 VIIIfx processor on which they are based and which power the K computer. Each processor has 16 cores and achieves world-class standalone performance levels of 236.5 gigaflops and performance per watt of over 2 gigaflops." Not that K is any slouch.

Re:I wish someone would put sparc on the desktop

[TheRaven64]

I have one of Sun's cheap workstations - the Blade 100, which was 100% cheap commodity crap plus an UltraSPARC CPU. The problem is that they don't have anything like the economies of scale required to make cheap chips. If Intel is selling 100 chips for every one that Sun is selling (which is quite optimistic for Sun / Oracle), then the unit cost of the SPARC is going to be a lot bigger, even if the two chips are the same size and made on the same process, just because all of the one-off costs (including R&D) are spread over a much smaller number of chips. A cheap Sun workstation is still likely to be a few hundred dollars more than an equivalent x86 system, even if all of the components other than the CPU are the same, and that limits them to people who really need to be able to develop on SPARC...