Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

It will be interesting to see how well the 90 million dollar Red Storm actually perfroms. It projected to be in the area of
this SGI system, but for 70 million less.

You would have to compare the amount of memory and storage
attached to both systems for an proper cost comparison. The
processors represent a small fraction of the overall system
cost. Also keep in mind that the NASA performance number
is a measured result for sustained performance of a portion
of the system. The full system should yield over 50 TFLOP/s.
The ~40 TFLOP/s figure for Red Storm is peak performance.
Existing results on Dongarra's list shows Opteron achieves
at best around 70% efficiency on Linpack even with the PGI
compiler compared to 88% demonstrated on the new NASA
IPF system. So apples to apples the NASA supercomputer
is nearly twice as fast as Red Storm with a similar number of
processors. Not bad for a "dead" chip that's been shipping
commercially for 16 months or so. :-P