[Beowulf] Opteron

[Mark Hahn]

> Come on then SC07'ers. Whats the buzz with barcelona?

I didn't get to go dammit, but I think Intel used Penryn reporting
extremely effectively.  I'm personally astonished how poorly AMD 
is doing in keeping up, or at least appearing to keep up.  so far,
it's quite sad: only very low-clock chips and no real promise of any
upcoming save-the-bacon feature.  AFAIKT, Intel has pretty much 
destroyed AMD's lead in memory performance now.  unless Hf gates 
start turning to cheddar, or Quickpath fails utterly, I really don't
see AMD surviving.

any benefit from the ATI merger is more than a few years off, IMO,
and quite specialized.  Fusion may be a useful feature for markets 
where a highly integrated solution is rewarded (cheap desktops, laptops).
so far, at least, it's just "chip legos", which is not what I'd call
a Big Vision.  Intel's reported approach of x86-ISA-based GPUs sounds
MUCH more exciting, since it could be hopefully be subverted to do HPC
(and without the sadistic computing model of current GP-GPU.)

who knows?  maybe AMD will do a quick merger with TSMC, start 
producing K10's next month with 8M onchip L3 using TSMC's 55nm process,
run at 3.5 GHz with ddr3/1600.  short of something fairly dramatic 
in those directions, it's hard to see reasons not to buy Intel.

I'm more interested in hearing whether 10G eth made a good showing
vs IB.

regards, mark hahn.