Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[kpf]

yb So, we should see dozens and dozens of small 96-Opteron supercomputers all around the world. It will be pretty cheap and the fastest thing you can get out of one rack.

Yeah, guess IBM will built dozens for its own computing on demand business - to start with. For a sales-position, these racks should be unasailable for any 64-way Itanium-rack price/performancewise.

As for the Concept of Red Storm, although not my turf (what you are discussing in detail exceeds my limits of understanding by far). But as far as I understand everyone of the architecture guys agrees in the following statement: (Posted by Mike Haertel on comp.arch recently, format edited)

The real dominant consideration in processor performance is latency to main memory.

(ed: Elaboration in context, i kept this message because of the implication that integrated memory controller of K8 is focussing this bottleneck as well) Most of the die area of most microprocessors is devoted to trying to hide this problem, and the bag of tricks used by CISC and RISC designs is the same. So it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the performance of CISC and RISC designs is also about the same.

From this viewpoint the way Red Storm is designed is nothing less than consequently adressing the bottleneck of computing as current state of the art.

K.