Cray, Intel To Partner On Hybrid Supercomputer 106
An anonymous reader writes "Intel convinced Cray to collaborate on what many believe will be the next generation of supercomputers — CPUs complemented by floating-point acceleration units. NVIDIA successfully placed its Tesla cards in an upcoming Bull supercomputer, and today we learn that Cray will be using Intel's x86 Larrabee accelerators in a supercomputer that is expected to be unveiled by 2011. It's a new chapter in the Intel-NVIDIA battle and a glimpse at the future of supercomputers operating in the petaflop range. The deal has also got to be a blow to AMD, which has been Cray's main chip supplier."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Floating-point acceleration unit, sounds famili (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps now that Intel and nVidia have commercial "floating-point acceleration units" for supercomputers, AMD/ATI will come up with something too? The Hypertransport bus is already pretty popular with supercomputers for plugging an interconnect into (Infiniband/path, as well as Cray's own) so a GPU (sorry, "floating point accelerator") that plugs directly into that bus and has direct communication with the system's CPU(s) should be pretty nice.
I know I wouldn't mind going from a dedicated graphics card to having a motherboard with two processor sockets with independent ram, cpu in one and gpu in the other. PCIe is just an unnecessary layer when the gpu could be plugged directly into the cpu's main bus.