Intel Corp (INTC)

[mmoy]

My son works in an area with a lot of number crunching but it's integer work and they have a honking big Xeon system with a lot of processors, flash and RAM. His area is a growing area and I'm sure that it consumes Xeons rather nicely. It isn't something that would be easily run on HPC systems because there's a lot of branchy code and the data is far more integer-oriented.

It's a lot easier to code for traditional systems too. There are a lot of biologists coding and a lot of them don't have computer science backgrounds so asking them to do parallel processing programming can be too hard - they know what they know and like to code in what they like to code in, inefficient as it may be. It's easier to buy more Xeons.

Microsoft is going to embed R in SQL Server in an upcoming release so that users don't have to export data from the database to another format for processing in R. It may be that the messy parallel processing programming may be moved into a software layer from the database companies so that end users don't have to do parallel programming. I guess you'd want a Xeon with some kind of HPC board attached to it.