[Beowulf] Chinese supercomputers to use ‘homemade’ chips

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On Mar 11, 2011, at 7:20 AM, Mark Hahn wrote:

>> Interesting:
>> Chinese supercomputers to use ‘homemade’ chips
>> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/ 
>> Chinese-supercomputers-to-use-homemade-chips/articleshow/7655183.cms
>
> it's important to remind ourselves that China is still a centrally- 
> planned,
> totalitarian dictatorship.  I mention this only because this  
> announcement
> is a bit like Putin et al announcing that they'll develop their own  
> linux distro because Russia is big and important and mustn't allow  
> itself to be vulnerable to foreign hegemony.
>
> so far, the very shallow reporting I've seen has said that future  
> generations will add wide FP vector units.  nothing wrong with that,
> though it's a bit unclear to me why other companies haven't done it
> if there is, in fact, lots of important vector codes that will run  
> efficiently on such a configuration.  adding/widening vector FP is  
> not breakthrough engineering afaikt.
>
> has anyone heard anything juicy about the Tianhe interconnect? 
> _______________________________________________

Not really but busy with an AMD-GPU now the 6970 (note the 6990 also  
is available having 2 gpu's) is so fast
that the real problem is bandwidth from and to the gpu; so for a big  
cluster calculation i can understand very well
the need for having your own interconnect, especially as they get  
produced in china anyway.

the cpu's you also need bigtime, but as i'm going to react onto a  
special GPU posting anyway let's move it to that subject.

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