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Subject: Re: Opteron HyperTransport

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 16:37:48 07/08/03

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On July 08, 2003 at 08:37:49, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On July 08, 2003 at 00:33:09, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>
>>NEC Earth Simulator has 5120 NEC SX-7(?) vector processors.  Total cost was less
>>than $400m.
>
>around $680M it cost.

Provide a reference for that $680m number, and I might believe you.  I don't
accept random numbers without reference.

Less than $400m is quoted at these sites:
http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/Supercomputer-Japanese23jul02.htm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/editorial/3709294.htm
http://www.time.com/time/2002/inventions/rob_earth.html
http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~schoene/unter_texte/texte/sc2002/tsld004.htm
http://www.iht.com/articles/98820.html
http://cospa.phys.ntu.edu.tw/aapps/v12n2/v12-2n1.pdf
etc., etc.

The highest price I've seen is around $500m, nowhere near your number.

>>Here is a blurb about the chip, from the webpage:
>>
>>"Each AP consists of a 4-way super-scalar unit (SU), a vector unit (VU), and
>>main memory access control unit on a single LSI chip. The AP operates at a clock
>>frequency of 500MHz with some circuits operating at 1GHz. Each SU is a
>>super-scalar processor with 64KB instruction caches, 64KB data caches, and 128
>>general-purpose scalar registers. Branch prediction, data prefetching and
>>out-of-order instruction execution are all employed. Each VU has 72 vector
>>registers, each of which can has 256 vector elements, along with 8 sets of six
>>different types of vector pipelines: addition/shifting, multiplication,
>>division, logical operations, masking, and load/store. The same type of vector
>>pipelines works together by a single vector instruction and pipelines of
>>different types can operate concurrently."
>>
>>Each chip consumes only about 140W, rather than Vincent's assertion of 150KW.
>
>the 125KW is for Cray 'processors' not fujitsu processors that are in the NEC
>machine.
>
>Ask bob i remember he quoted 500 kilowatt for a 4 processor Cray. So i divided
>that by 4.

That 500KW was probably for the entire machine.  Each processor probably
consumes a very small amount of that.  The Earth Simulator uses some 7MW of
power in total, though only about 10% comes from the processors.

>Trivially Cray machines using the opterons will be consuming less than that.
>Note that the cpu costs is nothing compared to what the routers etc eat.

Of course.



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