Comment Re:Macs ? (Score 1) 460
For truly high speed clusters, the per port cost of the interconnect is a big piece of the puzzle. Thus you still want the maximum per processor performance. If you look at the Top 500 list you will see a number of highly ranked Intel machines. This is a very big recent development but they are all Xeon and Itanium systems, not budget Pentium 4s. So the G5 is price competitive, especially for floating point apps where PowerPC has always shined.
It would be a big coup if Apple can pull off even a top 10 finish, and it's not out of the question. If you'll look at the second decade of the Top 500 list you'll see several ~1000 processor pSeries 690 Turbo clusters. These are all 1.3GHz Power4 machines, the sister chip of the PPC970. Double the number of processors, each with roughly 1.5x clockspeed, and you're in the ballpark of a top 5 finish. The recently announced IBM FORTRAN compiler will help a lot with this. The open question will be whether the interconnect, which is rumored to be Infiniband, can keep up. If it works, this will sure sell a lot of G5 Xserves!
It would be a big coup if Apple can pull off even a top 10 finish, and it's not out of the question. If you'll look at the second decade of the Top 500 list you'll see several ~1000 processor pSeries 690 Turbo clusters. These are all 1.3GHz Power4 machines, the sister chip of the PPC970. Double the number of processors, each with roughly 1.5x clockspeed, and you're in the ballpark of a top 5 finish. The recently announced IBM FORTRAN compiler will help a lot with this. The open question will be whether the interconnect, which is rumored to be Infiniband, can keep up. If it works, this will sure sell a lot of G5 Xserves!
