Top 500 trends

[Richard Walsh]

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 09:22:20 Greg Lindahl:

>> > > If we're going to use metaphors, at least use fair ones.  It has been
>> > > years since any of the big iron computers could be compared to quality
>> > > PCs in speed or most other useful system dimension as oxen to chickens.
>> > 
>> > STREAM bandwidth is the main one.
>> 
>> out of curiosity, do you mean "PCs have improved a lot",
>> or "big iron is even faster now"?  
>
>Neither. Try reading what I quoted; if you compare vector cpus vs. PCs
>using the STREAM benchmark as your measure of speed...

In support of the idea that sustained bandwidth to/from memory is still 
an advantage vector computers (read custom designed) have, a single X1 
SSP processor should deliver over 600 64-bit MFLOPS sustained from memory 
(large arrays) for the stream triad. Back computing the bandwidth is 
left as an exercise. ;-) 

The machine has a cache to boost the number for smaller arrays.

rbw