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IT Blogwatch

A Daily Digest of IT Blogs from Richi Jennings

Wow, AMD better than Intel (it's official)

15 comments

TAGS:AMD, enterprise, IBM, INTC, Intel, supercomputer
IT TOPICS:Emerging Technology, Government & Regulation, Hardware, Mainframes & Supercomputers, Servers & Data Center

It's time, once again, for the Top 500 list of speedy supercomputers. AMD is crowing that the first four are powered by its chips. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers dissect the list and marvel at the big numbers.

By Richi Jennings. November 16, 2009.
(AMD) (INTC) (IBM)

Top500 logo Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention jingle-jingle...

Stephen Lawson gets his units mixed up:

The list of the Top 500 supercomputers, set to be released on Monday during the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, is compiled twice a year and is now in its 34th installment. The total capacity of the systems on the new list is 27.6 petaflops, up from 22.6 petaflops on the previous list in June. ... A Cray supercomputer ... has regained the title of the world's most powerful. ... The upgraded Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops per second from its 224,162 cores.
...
China entered the Top 10 with a hybrid Intel-AMD system. ... achieved 563 teraflops per second for the No. 5 ranking. It uses Intel Xeon processors with Advanced Micro Devices GPUs (graphics processing units) as accelerators. Each node of the 71,680-core system has two Xeons attached to two AMD GPUs. ... Tianhe-1 was built by the National University of Defense Technology.

Timothy Prickett-Morgan marvels:

You would never know the world was battling recession. Supercomputer centers keep chucking out old tech and rolling in new tech. ... The single biggest transition in the list is the move to quad-core - and in some notable cases, six-core - processors inside supercomputing systems. And most of the machines on the list now run Linux with x64 processors.
...
The differences are substantial enough for specific workloads to keep a whole bunch of HPC suppliers busy at a time in the market when you think there might be two suppliers left. ... AMD is still pretty pumped. ... After trying to outrun IBM's hybrid "Roadrunner" Opteron-Cell massively parallel blade server ... for the past several lists, the "Jaguar" all-Opteron XT5 box made by Cray and installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has pounced upon Roadrunner and pulled out some flesh and spit out some feathers.

Sebastian Pop notices a notable absence:

A notable fact is that Intel-powered machines weren't even runner-ups. The best-performing Intel-powered conglomerate only managed to score number five. ... One can only guess what kind of reaction this development stirred in Intel directors just days after having to sign an uneasy truce with their rival.
...
Roadrunner is also powered by AMD CPUs, along with the Kraken (which achieved third place) and Jugene (fourth place). ... Powering the best four supercomputers is an obvious indicator of just how much faster AMD central processing units are (or can be) compared with Intel's, and why the latter couldn't, so far, eliminate the former from the IT market.

Aharon Etengoff talked to the victor:

[AMD] Spokesperson John Frueheh told TG Daily that his company had achieved a "strong presence" in the HPC arena, with both AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs powering a number of top supercomputing systems. ... [He] added that AMD was planning to debut a line of 8- and 12-core x86 processors during the first quarter of 2010.
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Codenamed "Magny-Cours," [they] will be capable of delivering up to a 100 percent increase in compute core density and multi-threading capability. In addition, the processors will feature four channels of DDR-3 memory, as well as new power management and virtualization features. AMD is also slated to introduce its "Bulldozer" processor architecture in 2011. The chip's modular design is expected to increase concurrency, simultaneous command capabilities and multi-threading capacity with up to 16 dedicated cores.

But Miha Ahronovitz asks, "So what?":

The business model this list promotes brought the bankruptcy of SGI, Thinking Machines, Cray Research, SiCortex and many who designed supercomputers based on one criteria: to pass a LINPACK test. This was originally introduced in 1979, 30 years ago. It tests the floating point and little more. LINPACK tells nothing of how easy is to solve complex problems with a given supercomputer.
...
We should take actual applications used by enterprises and test the fastest supercomputers running them. We can have for example a TOP 500 for E-OLTP (Extreme on line transaction processing) computers designed to process more than 500,000 transactions per second, now that all banking and credit card processing and stock exchange need these types of volumes.

So what's your take?
Get involved: leave a comment.

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter, or richij on FriendFeed, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itblogwatch@richij.com.

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Performance/Cost

Submitted by Jay on November 30, 2009 - 4:46 P.M.

I think the reason why the top systems used AMD is because at the time they were built, the AMD platform offered the best performance per dollar, maybe even for incremental processor upgrades.

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A little reality check...

Submitted by Unbiased on November 16, 2009 - 9:31 P.M.

It looks like the Intel FUD machine jumped all over this one with the misinformation flying. Look at the list yourself. Going down through the first 20 places, AMD dominates, with PowerPC running second. Intel comparatively has a dismal showing. If you actually try running scientific applications (not Intel sponsored benchmark apps) on both, you'll find out that as usual the prevalent "conventional wisdom" is not as wise as some would think.

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The list is dominated by Intel

Submitted by Anonymous on November 16, 2009 - 1:35 P.M.

A quick look shows that though the system with the most processor cores that won the award for top performance was AMD, clearly the favorite processors for supercomputers are all Intel. Intel dominates the list 10:1 or more vs AMD, and outperforms AMD in the petaflops per processor category.

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Intels conroe makes AMD look

Submitted by Linda Masango on November 17, 2009 - 4:23 A.M.

Intels conroe makes AMD look like a P4, and P4 was DESIGNED to run at high speeds to make it (unfairly too) look faster then AMD (AMD 1400 sounds slower then a P4 1700), it wasnt a matter of efficency at the time, and it sadly worked.

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Upgrade Video

Submitted by Jake@AMD on November 16, 2009 - 1:05 P.M.

Check out a video of the processor upgrade process of "Kraken" (another Cray/AMD supercomputer) here: http://links.amd.com/CrayUpgrade.

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The core i7 beats out

Submitted by Benjie on November 16, 2009 - 10:31 A.M.

The core i7 beats out anything AMD has right now, but AMD's next gen CPUs are right around the corner and that should be a better comparison since AMD's current gen is one step behind Intel. The two of them have always been a hair bit out of sync with what "generation" tech they were on, Intel just has the upper hand right now.

Intel has always had better R&D for etching, so I've always been their fan boy, but AMD still makes a great product and we need the competition.

With Intel posting a record setting quarter, it's nice to see AMD still has a spot in the market for some extra money.

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floating point

Submitted by IT Blogwatch on November 16, 2009 - 10:37 A.M.

Ah, but Intel has always been weaker in floating point, hasn't it? Top500 is all about the FLOPS, baby.

Which reminds me. Here's a bonus link.

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FLOPS

Submitted by Benjie on November 16, 2009 - 12:24 P.M.

Actually, the i7 can compute 2FP/cycle/core while AMD can only do 1/cycle/core. This is why hyperthreading actually works this time 'round.

The corei5 dual core with hyper threading is out performing the phenom2 quadcore in many synthetic and realworld benchmarks

The big thing AMD has going for it is it has had NUMA for a long time and is quite tested for large scale super computers. Also, AMD is A LOT cheaper than Intel. Intel just got NUMA, but AMD has had its foot in the door for a long time in that department.

But really, comparing AMD's current CPUs vs the i7 is unfair. the i7 is brand new and the Phenom is about to get phased out by a possibly much greater architecture. I can't wait to see how the bulldozer does compared to Intel in 2 years when it comes out. Intel does have some tweaks lined up for the nahelem, so AMD best make sure their new tech does well.

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Thanks!

Submitted by IT Blogwatch on November 16, 2009 - 12:32 P.M.

Aha. Thanks for the updated info. Your humble blogwatcher is out of date.

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Number of Cores

Submitted by Old Computer Geek on November 16, 2009 - 2:40 P.M.

When you just start Adding Cores to make your Total calulations prove one CPU better than another, that proves nothing... I'd bet if I took 4 million old 286 CPU's and had the desire to build a board that would work with all them at the same time, it would beat these machines!... ok, maybe 8 Million...

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