Performance and Overclocking

[TooBoku]

Dude links a bunch of Play Station 3s into a cluster...

http://www.physorg.com/news92674403.html

Play Station 3 uses IBM's Cell processor which is a multi-core CPU consisting of one generic core similar to x86 complimented by 8 accelerators specializing in floating point calculations...

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/resear...innovation.html

As everyone already knows... AMD no longer uses a Front Side Bus, even though current Intel CPUs are outperforming AMDs in benchmarks, AMD's new technology, Direct Connect Architecture and HyperTransport are still in it's infancy. AMD CPUs, no longer bound by the front side bus now have direct access to the system memory, direct access to each other in multi-socket systems, and to each other's memory if their own memory proves to be insufficient. In 2006, they announced that they would be giving Original Equipment Manufaturers (OEMs) access to their HyperTransport layer in an initiative called Torrenza.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3649

IBM takes advantage of the Torrenza architecture and clusters AMD Opterton CPUs with direct connections to each other and accelerates them with their Cell CPUs. They implement this into their supercomputer dubbed "Roadrunner". In May 2008, Roadrunner becomes the first supercomputer stably maintain performance at over one PetaFLOPS (1,000,000,000,000,000 FLoating point Operations Per Second).

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/roa...609/index.shtml

ATI (now owned by AMD) announces a beta version of Folding@Home that utilizes the GPU instead of the CPU. ATI boasts that at certain applications, 3D image generation being the most obvious, run 100s of times faster on a Radeon than even the fastest x86 CPUs. Stream computing used in Folding@Home is another one of these applications.

http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/folding.html

Torrenza excpected to hit the market in 2010, I'm friggin excited as heck. ATI, having all the knowledge AMD has to offer on multi-core processing and Direct Connect architecture, will have one of the first coprocessors available for Torrenza. If IBM so chooses, they may also release Cell processors for Torrenza. Other manufacturers of FPGAs which are customizable processing units such as Sun Microsystems with OpenSPARC and Altera with Nios II, are expected to release their own products for the Torrenza platform.

In otherwords, the Amiga has been reincarnated!