[Beowulf] Teraflop chip hints at the future

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Yeah looks all like not much of a double precision.

Of course lucky my chess software is not using much floating point, but 
integers instead.

With respect to integer multiplication, what does the chip support there?

32 x 32 == 64 bits (stored in 2 registers)
64 x 64 == 128 bits ?

Thanks,
Vincent


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Hahn" <hahn at mcmaster.ca>
To: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 6:32 AM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Teraflop chip hints at the future


>> It looked like it did IEEE754 doubles.  Any Intel types out there to 
>> confirm/deny?
>
> singles:
>
> http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=363
>
> IMO, the chip is mainly interesting to explore how much we can abandon
> the von Neumann architecture as a whole, rather than stupidly putting
> more and more of them onto a chip.  after all, the nearest-neighbor
> latency (125 ps!) is comparable to cache or even register-file.
> (admittedly, in this chip, the links are only 32b wide, which means any 
> useful inter-PE message (say, at least a cachineline) would take
> more than a couple cycles...
>
> what I don't really understand is why there aren't lots of groups doing
> this kind of exploratory chip.  is it just that any interesting chip
> tends to push design, circuit and fab boundaries all at the same time?
>
>>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6354225.stm
>
> frankly, I'm a bit embarassed by all these experts being quoted as saying
> that multicore is the brave new world.  I saw one article that claimed 
> that no OS existed to utilize 80 threads, and that no programmers could 
> use them.
> (counterexample: Altix running Linux and OpenMP code from pretty mundane
> programmers...)
>
> amdahl's law: not just a good idea...
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