High Performance Computing Processors Felix Noble Mirayma V. Rodriguez Agnes Velez Electric and Computer Engineer Department August 25, 2004
Outline Introduction Characteristics Technology Advance Frequency Cache size Power Consumption Cost Conclusion References
Introduction High Performance Computing branch of computer science that concentrates on developing supercomputers and software to run on them. Programs that can be divided in to little pieces so that each piece can be executed simultaneously by separate processors.
Characteristics AMD Athlon MP for servers High-speed execution core with multiple x86 decoders three independent integer pipelines, three address calculation pipelines, and a superscalar, fully pipelined,three-way floating- point engine
Characteristics AMD Opteron for servers Support of up to three (3) coherent HyperTransport links, providing up to 19.2GB/s peak bandwidth per processor 256 Terabytes of memory address space Increased compute density; lower TCO for datacenters with limited power budgets
Characteristics G5 drives the largest performance gain in the history of the PowerPC can address up to 8GB of main memory highly parallel processing, two double- precision floating-point units and advanced branch prediction logic 40 times more data between RAM and the processor
Characteristics Intel Itanium® 2 Based on EPIC architecture Enhanced Machine Check Architecture (MCA) with extensive Error Correcting Code (ECC)
Characteristics Intel Xeon MP Processor System Bus : 400 MHz I/O Bandwidth: Up to 4.8GB/sec RAM: Dual Channel DDR 130 nm process technology
Technology Advance AMD Athlon MP for servers 3DNow Professional technology provides a more efficient, higher bandwidth bus provides scalable headroom for bandwidth- hungry applications such as large databases, CAD/CAM modeling, and simulation engines QuantiSpeed architecture
Technology Advance AMD Opteron for servers Direct Connect Architecture addresses and helps reduce the real challenges and bottlenecks of system architectures The front side bus (interface to memory) of the AMD Opteron™ processor runs at the speed of the processor
Technology Advance G5 Its frontside bus works at speeds up to 1.25GHz for an astounding 10GBps of total bandwidth. That makes it 450MHz faster than even the latest Intel 875 chipset, which sputters out at 800MHz. this high-performance frontside bus architecture lets each G5 discover and access data in the other processor’s cache
Technology Advance Intel Itanium® 2 Advanced Machine Check Architecture: Extensive error management in hardware, firmware and Operating Systems Enables powerful solutions for vast amounts of data and users, high volumes of transactions and complex calculations
Technology Advance Intel Xeon MP Processor Hyper-Threading Technology Intel NetBurst microarchitecture Rapid Execution Engine Advanced dynamic execution 533 MHz System Bus
Frequency AMD Athlon MP for servers GHz. AMD Opteron for servers – 2.4 GHz G GHz. Intel Itanium® GHz, 1.40 GHz, 1.50 GHz Intel Xeon MP Processor GHz to 3.0GHz.
Cache AMD Athlon MP for servers - L2: 512KB, L1: 128KB AMD Opteron for servers - L1: 128KB, L2: 1MB G5 - 1 MB Intel Itanium® 2 - L3: integrated 6MB, 4MB, and 3MB; L2: 256 KB; L1: 32 KB (Instruction and data) Intel Xeon MP Processor - L1: Execution Trace Cache; L2: 256KB, 512KB; L3: 512KB, 1M, 2M, 4M
Power Consumption AMD Athlon MP for servers - 60 Watts AMD Opteron for servers – (HE) 55 Watts and (EE) 30 Watts G Watts Intel Itanium® Watts Intel Xeon MP Processor - 74 Watts
Cost AMD Athlon MP for servers - $166 - $230 AMD Opteron for servers - $669 - $3199 G5 – not available Intel Itanium® 2 - $910; $1,980; $4,227 Intel Xeon MP Processor - $3,692
Conclusion After comparing all the processors in the chart, the best one in terms of frequency, cache size and power consumption result to be the IBM Powerpc 970 processor a.k.a. G5 for Macintosh.
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