Cray, a long time supporter of Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron microprocessor, on Monday announced that it would use Intel Corp.’s microprocessors for certain upcoming supercomputers. The announcement will allow Cray to rely on more suppliers of x86 microprocessors and not to suffer from potential delays of future AMD Opteron introductions.
“We’re excited at the potential of bringing together Intel’s powerful silicon expertise and Cray's industry leadership in scalable HPC systems. We pride ourselves in offering the most innovative supercomputing systems and our customers will now enjoy greater choice in processor technologies,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.
Cray and Intel signed a multi-year agreement to advance high-performance computing (HPC) on Intel microprocessors while delivering broad new Intel and Cray technologies in future Cray server systems. The two companies plan to explore future supercomputer component designs such as multi-core processing and advanced interconnects. As a result of this collaboration, Cray and Intel plan to develop a range of HPC systems and technologies over the next several years.
Up to now Cray relied on proprietary microprocessors as well as central processing units (CPUs) from Advanced Micro Devices, which very well suite for high-performance computing environments. However, due to AMD’s inability to ship quad-core AMD Opteron processors to Cray on time, the company did not earn revenues it expected to, ending 2007 with $186.2 million in revenue, considerably lower than $230 million the company anticipated in mid-2007. As a result, the collaboration of Cray with Intel, the arch-rival of AMD, is completely logical especially months ahead of Intel’s introduction of the new CPU micro-architecture and platform architecture.
“This collaboration provides the HPC market segment with access to the best microprocessors the industry has to offer at any point in time, in the most advanced supercomputers in the world. This further strengthens Cray's industry-leading adaptive supercomputing vision as we move into the Cascade timeframe and beyond,” Mr. Ungaro added.
Comments currently: 5
Discussion started: 04/29/08 10:20:16 AM
Latest comment: 04/30/08 12:58:32 PM
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1.
This actually shows who really has the better product and can ship in volumes! Cray acknowledges the topdog!
[Posted by: anti-\ | Date: 04/29/08 10:20:16 AM]
2.
AMD processors were only used to handle I/O anyways...
[Posted by: 1234 | Date: 04/29/08 01:05:05 PM]
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Cray XT4 and XT3 Supercomputers
Like previous MPP systems, the basic building block of the Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 systems is a PE. Each PE is comprised of one AMD processor (single, dual or quad core) coupled with its own memory and dedicated communication resource. This design eliminates the scheduling complexities and asymmetric performance problems associated with clusters of SMPs. It ensures that performance is uniform across distributed memory processes—an absolute requirement for scalable algorithms. Each Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 compute blade includes four compute PEs for high scalability in a small footprint. Service blades include two service PEs and provide direct I/O connectivity.
The Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 operating system UNICOS/lc™ is designed to run large complex applications and scale efficiently to 120,000 processor cores.
The AMD processor's native support for 32-bit and 64-bit applications and full x86-64 compatibility makes the Cray XT4 and Cray XT3 systems compatible with a vast quantity of existing compilers and libraries, including optimized C, C++, and Fortran90 compilers and high performance math libraries such as optimized versions of BLAS, FFTs, LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, and SuperLU.
http://www.cray.com/products/xt4/
[Posted by: JcK | Date: 04/30/08 12:58:32 PM]
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That is sad for AMD.
AMD has a better products for making super computers compared to Intel. Sure Intel has QuickPath (formly known as CSI), but it is not open as HyperTransport. Also AMD is a perfectionist compared to Intel. AMD provides quality while Intel provides quantity.
I think Stream and CUDA are better contenders for high performance computing compared to CPU. Both the Stream and CUDA based processors has very, very high performance in a small and very efficient space. Cray should look into this different way of computing.
[Posted by: linuxnerd | Date: 04/29/08 05:25:54 PM]
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AMD provides quality?!? since when?!? and that they're perfectionist?!?
what about the major delays?? the TLB??
and now this... http://xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20080429170610_AMD_Wa ns_about_Compatibility_Issues_Between_Latest_Processors_and_ ntry_Level_Platforms.html
You're radiating Phanboyism in your system!
[Posted by: S | Date: 04/29/08 10:17:54 PM]
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