3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
6:27 p.m.
On 03/06/13 4:30 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
On 3 June 2013 20:39, Cory Smelosky<b4 at
gewt.net> wrote:
Yet, POWER and SPARC64 account for six of the top 10 supercomputers in
the November 2012 list.
http://www.top500.org/lists/2012/11/
That's what bothers me about the x86
architecture...it gets such a kludgy
mess due to tacking it all on. Intel EM64T: it's amd64 so 64-bit with
32-bit x86 which is tacked on to a 16-bit architecture which is tacked on to
an 8-bit architecture and so on...
Yes it is. However, it has thrived when simpler, cleaner CPU
architectures have failed. Possibly an exemplar of the "worse is
better" school of thought, possibly because of its installed base of
software, possibly because of the tools, chipsets etc. - or possibly
because of the strength of Microsoft, who knows.
POWER is bigger and runs hotter these days.
SPARC and MIPS were unable to compete on CPU performance.
ARM never competed on CPU performance since the end of the 1980s, but
did on performance/Watt and price.
Alpha coulda been a contender -- maybe -- but I learned recently that
its inter-CPU comms, synchronisation and so on were, I am told,
terrible, being very basic and rather unreliable.
It also dominated high performance computing for a long time, while
Intel and AMD caught up (by poaching Alpha engineers, in many cases :)
--Toby
--
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