Intel Corp (INTC)

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Kpf, Re: If you consider HPC as a niche...

It is a niche, at least in the perspective of processor sales.

Re: I could easily imagine Xeon-Systems partnered with Clearspeed Silicon to build 32-bit HPC-Clusters and Workstations for scientific appliances.

They could also be paired with Itanium systems.

Re: The dilemma is, such systems would be cheap and performant enough to be a hell of a threat to Itanium.

You are jumping too far here. Right now, ClearSpeed silicon is not enough to replace current implementations. It's a new architecture, and tools and applications will need to be ported to it, just like anything else. You know how long it's taken Intel to build the infrastructure for Itanium. Do you think ClearSpeed can possibly fare better? The only way it would be a threat to Itanium is if they can. It would have to be as easy as pluging in an adapter card with these CPUs and, "presto", more floating point performance. That's not the way these solutions are going to work. Organizations will have to spend the money to port their code and optimize it around these new solutions, and there is a learning curve involved, too. It's perhaps years off from being used in a commercial system, much less threat worthy to Itanium.

And of course, if things change, and these parts can be used ubiquitously, then nothing stops Intel from integrating a similar design onto their silicon. That's how floating point originally ended up in an x86 processor.

Re: Not sure the Clearspeed-product announced is what it takes though - 64-bit and Hypertransport-bus is what it would take

LOL.