Replies to post #7533 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

>> Amazing what you can do when the entire benchmark
>> fits in on-die cache!
>
> Nice theory but the only company that can come close
> to that is IBM with 128 MB L3 in POWER4(+) systems.

Surely that's not on-die?

The L3 data is stored off-chip but the L3 tags and control logic are on the
processor. I didn't mean to imply that the 128 MB was on-die cache, but
rather the 128 MB shared cache capacity was almost sufficient to swallow
up SPEC CPU 2k.

I stand by what I said earlier, the new entries to the top500 list this year will be
Opterons and Itaniums. Why bother with anything else?

The biggest loser will be Sun. Their US-III family of processors is pathetic compared
to I2, POWER, and Opteron. I'd be surprised if they have any systems left on the
list next year. IMO Sun has to abandon SPARC sooner rather than later or their
rate of decline will dramatically increase until someone acquires them for Solaris.
The interesting question becomes which way will they jump? IPF or AMD64? Stay
tuned...

[wbmw]

Haddock, Re: I stand by what I said earlier, the new entries to the top500 list this year will be Opterons and Itaniums. Why bother with anything else?

I suspect we'll continue to see a lot of Xeons on the list. Why? They're cheap, the infrastructure is all there, and there is exceptionally broad OEM support. The enterprise market doesn't do a 180 degree turn now that AMD has 64-bit extensions.