I Should Surrender to Opteron

I was quite excited by the news of the NEC SX-6i computer, which used a
single processor of the advanced supercomputer type used in their bigger
machines. I felt it was too bad that regular chip makers did not take a
leaf out of their book in designing their chips.

The SX-6i offered 8 GFlops speed. Now this is technology that has been
around a few years at this point.

Anyways, more recently, Intel, with prototypes of its *dual core*
Itanium chips got 45 GFlops out of four of them. 11.5 GFlops per chip,
or 5.7 GFlops per core. Not shabby.

Then, on the site for AMD, I see that they compare 1, 2, and 4 processor
Opteron systems to similar Itanium systems. Existing 1.5 GHz Itaniums,
it is true, not future prototypes. The single processor Opteron has
slightly lower performance than the Itanium, but with multiple
processors, the advantages of AMD's advanced interconnect technology
show through.

And, of course, with an Opteron, you don't have to switch architectures
from the mainstream 386 architecture that supports today's most popular
software.

So it appears that the performance gap between the x86 world and the
chips in computers like the Cray X-1 or NEC SX-6 really *is* closing
fast.

And then there's that chip that has 96 floating-point units on it, which
AMD is planning to have a coprocessor for its chips based on, according
to a recent tech article that I learned about from some newsgroup (maybe
this one)... (or was it a web search?)

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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