AMD Gains In the TOP500 List

MojoKid writes "AMD recently announced its share of the TOP500 supercomputer list has grown 15 percent in the past six months. The company credits industry trends, upgrade paths, and competitive pricing for the increase. Of the 68 Opteron-based systems on the list, more than half of them use the Opteron 6100 series processors. The inflection point was marked by AMD's launch of their Magny-Cours architecture more than a year ago and includes the twelve-core Opteron 6180 SE at 2.5GHz at one end and two low-power parts at the other. Magny-Cours adoption is important. Companies typically don't upgrade HPC clusters with new CPUs, but AMD is billing their next-gen Interlagos architecture as a drop-in option for Magny-Cours. As such, it'll offer up to 2x the cores as well as equal-to or faster clock speeds."

Re:Congratulations

[mehemiah]

funny, whats more news worthy is that a SPARC chip reached the top. That hasn't happened in like a decade has it? (i haven't checked it in a while)

Highlights as per Top500 site

[gupg]

The top500 site has its own take on highlights:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2011/06/press-release [top500.org]

- The two Chinese systems at No. 2 and No. 4 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation, and a total of 19 systems on the list are using GPU technology.
- China keeps increasing its number of systems and is now up to 62, making it clearly the No. 2 country as a user of HPC, ahead of Germany, UK, Japan and France.
- Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (77.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list strongly with 169 systems, compared with 56 in the last list.
- Quad-core processors are used in 46.2 percent of the systems, while already 42.4 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
- Cray defended the No. 2 spot in market share by total against Fujitsu, but IBM stays well ahead of either. Cray’s XT system series remains very popular for big research customers, with three systems in the TOP 10 (one new and two previously listed).

In my opinion, the newest & most important trend in high performance computing is the advent of accelerators like GPUs.

Re:Congratulations

[wisty]

I think Intel, with its Larrabee thingy (now Knights Ferry?) will come to dominate the lists even more, in the short term. But honestly, who wants it?

People (like, 99% of people) want a reasonable CPU, and maybe a GPU for games. Most researchers want fast cores (parallel problems are hard), or vector processing (Matlab, Scipy, Mathematica etc take the pain out of distributing the workload), or distributed systems; in that order.

So normal people will want Fusion for its cheap GPU, and researchers will want it because it's actually easier to program.

AMD might have a bright medium-term future.

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[account_deleted]

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I want to like AMD.

[TheRealQuestor]

I really honestly DO want to like them. And I don't really hate them any more [mostly since I stopped using them about 4 or so years ago] And to be honest for the dollar AMD does quite well against Intel for most needs. My problem with AMD systems are a much MUCH higher failure rate for the motherboards using the same brand, quality, and price point as the intel bretheren:( and they are slower.

My biggiest issue is I am VERY VERY impatient when it comes to computers and I can't find anything from AMD that even comes CLOSE to my current i7 2600K @ 5Ghz. Not even a mb/cpu(s)/memory costing 3 times as much can touch this thing in most everyday things I do such as read/program/play games/photoshop/repeat. I finally, a few weeks ago, broke down and gave them another chance and built "my" 1st amd rig in like I said about 4 or so years and whilst it's fine for the money [it's a Phenom II X4 955 Black, water cooled, overclocked to 4.2Ghz with 4 gigs DDR3 @ 1333]. it's still much slower than the i5 I built around the same time [i5 750 @ 3.4Ghz, and 12 gigs DDR3 @1328 air cooled] and both cost about the same in parts, yet the i5 SMOKES the 955 even at 800Mhz less per core. So dollar for dollar you're still "faster" with intel and I Like fast. I pay well for fast. IF Amd was faster I'd be using them right now but they don't have ANYTHING to offer me except the HD 6990 I have in here but that's still ATI in my minds eye.

AMD will need to pull a major magic rabbit out thier hats on this upcoming bulldozer [which does seem to have intel worried as they are delaying the x78 chipset and subsiquent LGA2011 cpu's and boards until AMD reviels thier hand]. Smart on thier part I guess, sucks on mine cause I couldn't wait and went with the flakey p67 but hey in a couple of months I'll have a fairly cheap motherboard/cpu combo for sale :)

i just don't see it.