China Building a 100-petaflop Supercomputer Using Domestic Processors 154
concealment writes "As the U.S. launched what's expected to be the world's fastest supercomputer at 20 petaflops, China is building a machine that is intended to be five times faster when it is deployed in 2015. China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer will run at 100 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), according to the Guangzhou Supercomputing Center, where the machine will be housed. Tianhe-2 could help keep China competitive with the future supercomputers of other countries, as industry experts estimate machines will start reaching 1,000-petaflop performance by 2018."
And, naturally, it's planned to use a domestically developed MIPS processor
Re:Yeah right (Score:2, Informative)
Copying the instruction set is not the same as copying the processor.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Could You Clarify Something for Me? (Score:5, Informative)
That old Alpha chip did about 5 GFLOPS with a single core on 666Mhz, so 16 of these at 1.1Ghz would go up to about the 140GFLOPS that are stated on the wikipedia on the ShenWei SW1600. Thats about twice as fast as an i7-930@4.2 Ghz.
So so much for decades old technology. It was just abondoned because there was to little market for it, but that doesn't mean it's bad stuf.
Re:Could You Clarify Something for Me? (Score:5, Informative)
It was just abondoned because there was to little market for it,
No, it was abandoned because HP/Compaq ended up owning the Alpha and PA-RISC and Intel convinced them that they could lower costs by outsourcing their CPU design and use Itanium instead. There were still a lot of people who wanted to buy new Alphas, and they got stuck with Itaniums instead. The ones that weren't on VMS or NonStop just gave up and switched to commodity x86 and some open source *NIX.
Re:Could You Clarify Something for Me? (Score:5, Informative)
That old Alpha chip did about 5 GFLOPS with a single core on 666Mhz, so 16 of these at 1.1Ghz would go up to about the 140GFLOPS that are stated on the wikipedia on the ShenWei SW1600. Thats about twice as fast as an i7-930@4.2 Ghz.
You're right. Alpha CPUs were, AFAIK, quite well-suited for multicore operation, though the Chinese must have created some impressive glue logic.
The original 21164 was implemented using a paltry (by today's standards) 10 million transistors. Using 350 nm technology, at that. The Chinese are capable of reducing that by about an order of magnitude, achieving a significant speedup because of the smaller gates - that's just by using the new cleanroom microfabrication tech.
Actually, I'm wishing good luck to the Chinese engineers. And a big fat "fuck you" to the managers/CxOs that doomed the amazing technologies from DEC (Alpha wasn't the only one that died on the chopping board of corporate stupidity).