Tag Archives: CPU

Cost: The Biggest Pothole on the Exascale Road

Posted on May 31, 2014 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Recently, industry analyst John Barr wrote at the ISC blog about “Potholes on the Road to Exascale”. John speaks about a unified programming environment that should be able to support all sorts of computing devices of the future. That’s right: … Continue reading →

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Many-core and InfiniBand: Making Your Own CPUs Gives You Independence

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

The headline sounds like the obvious thing: of course, if you can make your own CPUs for your projects, then you don’t have to rely on CPU manufacturers. “But wait”, you would ask, “Aren’t CPU design and manufacture very expensive?” … Continue reading →

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Memory Bandwidth for Intel Xeon Phi (And Friends)

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

John D. McCalpin, Ph.D., informally known as “Dr. Bandwidth” for his invention of STREAM memory bandwidth benchmark, posted STREAM results for Intel Xeon Phi and two Xeon-based servers made by Dell (see the end of his blog entry). All three … Continue reading →

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System-on-Wafer: Integrated Circuit Packaging Considered Harmful

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Silicon wafers contain enormous numbers of microprocessors. For example, a typical 300 mm wafer, as used by Intel, can contain about 130 dies of Intel Core i7 “Sandy Bridge-E” CPUs (use the formula, Luke, and substitute S=435 mm² for a … Continue reading →

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Intel MIC, aka Xeon Phi, aka Doubtful Creativity

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

They created a monster. It contains enough cores to be a computer on its own — yet it needs to be plugged into a “real” computer, and acts only as an accelerator. It’s cores are based on P54C architecture, introduced … Continue reading →

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The Giants That Slowed Down

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

During the recent decades, the US was able to attract the best scientists from all over the world in every field, including computing, by providing them with competitive salaries and benefits. But now research budgets are being cut, and the … Continue reading →

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X86 Has to Go Away, Revolution is Necessary

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Sometimes I visit big vendors’ presentations where they talk about their new servers. The audience — systems administrators, engineers, technicians — are listening very carefully, trying to grasp every word. They like to hear that the new server, equipped with … Continue reading →

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