[Beowulf] Gen - 1 Clusters

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 06:36:23PM -0400, Mark Hahn wrote:

> I think this is slightly mistaken: DC is not a generational shift, but rather
> mostly a packaging change.  DC chips have twice the area of SC, and therefore

What makes you conclude this?  And if it is true, what is the
underlying mechanism for most of the major chip manufacturers moving
to dual core at similar times, fashion?

I ask seriously.  I actually know little about it, but my assumption
is that the chip designers are having difficulty taking an existing
chip using N transistors and figuring out how to instead use N*2
transistors to to double the performance by extracting more
instruction level parallelism out of serial code.  And that those
designers are therefore doing the obvious thing - giving up - and are
instead using those N*2 transistors to build to CPUs each with the
same old N transitors.

Is this model incorrect?

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/