Intel price drops haven't been huge so far, but that just changed. Here's some history for this past week.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/31621/137/

That thread doesn't show the newly released 4MB E6x20s either. i was looking at getting an x2 but i heard the price drop was coming and so waited and ordered an E6420 and motherboard on Friday last week.

I really hope AMD's Barcelona/Kuma etc destroy core2 but i couldn't resist a nice shiny new 1k+ RAC machine :D

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Next generation high performance processor unveiled

The prototype for a revolutionary new general-purpose computer processor, which has the potential of reaching trillions of calculations per second, has been designed and built by a team of computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin.

The new processor, known as TRIPS (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), could be used to accelerate industrial, consumer and scientific computing.

Unlike conventional architectures that process one instruction at a time, EDGE can process large blocks of information all at once and more efficiently.

Current "multicore" processing technologies increase speed by adding more processors, which individually may not be any faster than previous processors.

Adding processors shifts the burden of obtaining better performance to software programmers, who must assume the difficult task of rewriting their code to run well on a potentially large number of processors.

I really hope AMD's Barcelona/Kuma etc destroy core2 but i couldn't resist a nice shiny new 1k+ RAC machine :D

based on what i know ... sorry, not going to happen :)
nice try, now, i am sure i am going to hear that K11 will destroy Core 2, may be K12 ?????

hhehehehe


who?

i just wanna know Who? will the first one out with octo-core or better !

I really hope AMD's Barcelona/Kuma etc destroy core2 but i couldn't resist a nice shiny new 1k+ RAC machine :D

based on what i know ... sorry, not going to happen :)
nice try, now, i am sure i am going to hear that K11 will destroy Core 2, may be K12 ?????

hhehehehe


who?

i just wanna know Who? will the first one out with octo-core or better !

Well, Intel will 'win' this for sure. They have 6 core parts coming out soon, I'm not sure if 8 core will happen at the same time but it might.

What I'm interested in is how the different cpu's will handle Rosetta. AMD's upcoming quad core is a single piece of silicon. Intel's quad (and I'm assuming 6 core) procs are 2 (or 3) pieces of silicon on the same chip. Intel relies on the FSB for the cores to talk to each other, AMD has a way of directly communicating between cores. If that matters for R@H we'll see :)

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i just wanna know Who? will the first one out with octo-core or better !

I really hope AMD's Barcelona/Kuma etc destroy core2 but i couldn't resist a nice shiny new 1k+ RAC machine :D

based on what i know ... sorry, not going to happen :)
nice try, now, i am sure i am going to hear that K11 will destroy Core 2, may be K12 ?????

hhehehehe


who?

8 core on AM2 and AM3 will be funny ... not enough bandwitch, they will need to copy more complex protocol like CSI to successfully use 8 cores.

who?

8-core Xeon X5365 V8 Performance Preview

So our conclusion? With the Intel V8, we are seeing two things. The Intel V8 is fast. Faster than anything we’ve ever tested before. However, for the first time, we are seeing limitations of the platform behind Intel’s Core 2 architecture. This is monumental because we are seeing the potential for AMD’s memory architecture to play a major role in the upcoming 8-core world and beyond. Suddenly, CPUs have gotten interesting again.

New graphic chips from AMD/ATI
http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/070514/1462062.html?.v=1
Quad-core, "Codenamed FASN8 -- pronounced 'fascinate'...AMD is charging $399 for the add-in card using the new chip, about half the price of Santa Clara-based Nvidia".

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

New graphic chips from AMD/ATI
http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/070514/1462062.html?.v=1
Quad-core, "Codenamed FASN8 -- pronounced 'fascinate'...AMD is charging $399 for the add-in card using the new chip, about half the price of Santa Clara-based Nvidia".

Half price!!! because the performance is half too :)
(out of topic reply from Feet1st)
who?

It's not half of the performance.

HD2900 rival is 8800GTS 640 MB which costs 400$ +/-.

This mont the HD2900 will drop price because the overclocked versions are comming out. The only problem of the HD are the terrible drivers, but when 8800 series came out they suffered with the same problem.

Let's wait for good drivers and for what we can see in 3dmark benchmarks this babies will be close to 8800GTX or even better.

But it's normal see Who? saying Nvidia products are better...

Nvidia reportedly to trade technology for cooperation with Intel


Nvidia plans to release some of its graphics processor unit (GPU) technology to Intel in exchange for cooperation with the chip giant, according to sources at motherboard makers.

Nvidia has had discussions with Intel and has already reached several agreements for cooperation, noted the sources, adding that details of the agreements remain unknown.

Nvidia Taiwan declined to comment on the report.

Executives of Nvidia recently met with the company's partners in Taiwan to explain the company's plan in the motherboard market, pointed out the sources. With Intel pushing its GPU development again, Nvidia needs to be careful about trading its GPU technology with Intel in exchange for cooperation, added the sources.

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20070507PD208.html

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IBM to launch Power6 chip next month

Delivering on its promise of a superfast server chip, IBM Corp. said Monday that its new Power6 microprocessor will go on sale next month, boasting twice the clock speed of the previous generation while consuming roughly the same amount of power.

While other chipmakers are dialing down clock speeds and adding more computing engines, or cores, to their chips to manage the competing concerns, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said its new dual-core chip is a breakthrough on both fronts.

Analysts said the chip, which operates at 4.7 gigahertz and cycles at a speed 25 million times as fast as the flap of hummingbird wings, will allow businesses to consolidate servers and handle substantially larger workloads.

By comparison, Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 server processor tops out at 1.66 gigahertz.

In addition to raw power, the new IBM chip also has massive bandwidth — 300 gigabytes per second — which the company says can process the download of the entire iTunes music catalog, currently more than 5 million songs, in about a minute.

To feed data quickly to the processor, IBM has quadrupled the amount of on-chip memory, or cache, to 8 megabytes. The chip is designed for higher-end servers running the Unix operating system and is accompanied by the launch of a new server designed around it.

With all these advances in CPU's and GPU's, I really hope that DC projects are able to find a way ($'s ?) to have their code take advantage of these crazy strides.....


Intel shows off 2 TFLOPS processor

INTEL'S ANNUAL Research@Intel Day here in Santa Clara kicked off in high gear, with Chipzilla letting out boffins from the lab to see the light of day. Intel has its fair share of "Blue Sky" projects but probably the most impressive is from its Tera Scale Computing group of projects. After demonstrating 80-core silicon in Beijing, brave researchers have now polished the cooling component and tweaked the silicon, so now the performance reaches two TeraFLOPS when these 80 floating-point mini-cores are working at no less than 6.26GHz. The Interesting thing about this demo was the fact that these cores achieve 1TFLOPS at 3.13GHz and at that clock, power consumption is only 24 Watts, while for double more, 6.26GHz eats up more th157 Watts.

In idle, only four out of 80 cores are working, at 3.13GHz and they consume only 3.32 Watts, meaning that one FP unit eats only 0.83W at 3.13 GHz.

Now, here's the big kicker for this demo. Currently, this project is actually split in two: one project is currently integrating x86 cores into an massive 80-core monster, while another project is actually stacking of SRAM and DRAM memory on top of this Tera-Scale processing monster. When that happens, cache memory will have bandwidth measured in hundreds of gigabytes per second.

This very impressive stuff has only one real problem when "coming to life" part is concerned. With X86 cores onboard, this CPU would simply, without any doubt whatever, slaughter the Itanic like there's no tomorrow.

I swear I've heard all this before. Not all on a single chip mind you, but the whole idea of arrays of processors has been kicking around for a long time, and it might be instructive to glance at a bit of history. For instance, there is THIS PAGE which brings back some old memories:

Not to be outdone, Fermilab has also used its high energy experimental physics emulators to construct a lattice QCD machine called ACPMAPS. This is a MIMD machine, using a Weitek floating-point chip set on each node. A 16-node machine, with a peak rate of , was finished in 1989. A 256-node machine, arranged as a hypercube of crates, with eight nodes communicating through a crossbar in each crate, was completed in 1991 [Fischler:92a]. It has a peak rate of , and a sustained rate of about for QCD. An upgrade of ACPMAPS is planned, with the number of nodes being increased and the present processors being replaced with two Intel i860 chips per node, giving a peak performance of per node. These performance figures are summarized in Table 4.3. (The ``real'' performances are the actual performances obtained on QCD codes.)

Major calculations have also been performed on commercial SIMD machines, first on the ICL Distributed Array Processor (DAP) at Edinburgh University during the period from 1982 to 1987 [Wallace:84a], and now on the TMC Connection Machine (CM-2); and on commercial distributed memory MIMD machines like the nCUBE hypercube and Intel Touchstone Delta machines at Caltech. Currently, the Connection Machine is the most powerful commercial QCD machine available, running full QCD at a sustained rate of approximately on a CM-2 [Baillie:89e], [Brickner:91b]. However, simulations have recently been performed at a rate of on the experimental Intel Touchstone Delta at Caltech. This is a MIMD machine made up of 528 Intel i860 processors connected in a two-dimensional mesh, with a peak performance of for 32-bit arithmetic. These results compare favorably with performances on traditional (vector) supercomputers. Highly optimized QCD code runs at about per processor on a CRAY Y-MP, or on a fully configured eight-processor machine.

The generation of commercial parallel supercomputers, represented by the CM-5 and the Intel Paragon, have a peak performance of over . There was a proposal for the development of a TeraFLOPS parallel supercomputer for QCD and other numerically intensive simulations [Christ:91a], [Aoki:91a]. The goal was to build a machine based on the CM-5 architecture in collaboration with Thinking Machines Corporation, which would be ready by 1995 at a cost of around $40 million.

From the above you can get the idea that Intel has been at this game for a while. The commercial version of the Touchstone system was the Intel Paragon XP, which boasted all of 75 M-Flops per i860 RISC CPU. the article reports that the system of a decade or so ago could scale up to about 280 G-Flops, but nobody could afford to buy (or write software for) a system of that size, so the pieces were broken up and sold individually.

These things were huge clunkers. A 256-node Intel Hypercube was the size of a closet (or a tall and deep rack of datacenter equipment of any flavor if that relates better for you).

So, lets get real here: even if Intel gets to "first silicon" on an actual product someday soon, it is going to be years and years before the software is available to use one of these things properly, and the price tag is bound to be many thousands of dollars for a server-type chip (which presumably could actually use an 80-thread CPU). Remember the first Itaniums a few years back? Like that, only worse!

That doesn't mean I don't think this is neat. But I'm not holding my breath, or holding off on buying a 4 or 8 core Xeon if I ever get the money. I know from past experience that large-scale multiprocessing is Trouble with a capital-T and so I won't be volunteering to purchase the bleeding-edge of that technology!

== Bill

Could be something along the lines of what the PS3 CELL does. It has one CPU and 8 SPUs (Synergistic Processing Units). Not sure though.

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From the BBC today: Supercomputer steps up the pace

Blue Gene/P is three times more potent than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM.

The latest number cruncher is capable of operating at so called "petaflop" speeds - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

...

Currently the most powerful machine is Blue Gene/L, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Used to ensure that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable, it has achieved 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second.

The machine packs 131,072 processors and is theoretically capable of reaching 367 teraflops.

By comparison the standard one petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912-processors connected by a high-speed, optical network.

However, it can be expanded to pack 884,736 processors, a configuration that would allow the machine to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per second (three petaflops).

So, teraflops are so yesterday. Give me my petaflops!

== Bill

Speaking of petaflops, any of these teraflop+ machines would make a large dent in the Rosetta processing as the home page says this: "TeraFLOPS estimate: 51.857"

So, all of us folks are only managing to contribute a measely 52 teraflops, more or less. So, do you think one of those supercomputer owners would run BOINC for us in the computer's spare time?

== Bill

Speaking of petaflops, any of these teraflop+ machines would make a large dent in the Rosetta processing as the home page says this: "TeraFLOPS estimate: 51.857"

So, all of us folks are only managing to contribute a measely 52 teraflops, more or less. So, do you think one of those supercomputer owners would run BOINC for us in the computer's spare time?

== Bill

Heck, get Dr Baker to ask them. lol
Cray is in Seattle so he could just drive over to them from the campus and have a chat with them and call up some of the clients of Cray. I machine would clean up in one cycle what it takes us, what, a month or more to create the same amount of data?

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I really hope AMD's Barcelona/Kuma etc destroy core2 but i couldn't resist a nice shiny new 1k+ RAC machine :D

based on what i know ... sorry, not going to happen :)
nice try, now, i am sure i am going to hear that K11 will destroy Core 2, may be K12 ?????

hhehehehe


who?

So, now we know ... Naive Quad Core will come at 2.0Ghz. It does not even get close to Clowertown on 99% of the benchmark

:( dissapointing.

who?