Quad-core Opteron + co-processor

[Grumble]

This news item is a few days old, but I don't think it's been mentioned
in either newsgroup.

AMD considers Clearspeed math co-processor
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060315-6392.html

<quote Hannibal>
It has been over a year since I last reported on Clearspeed, the company
that made waves on the hardware scene in 2003 with a massively parallel
floating-point processor aimed at accelerating math-intensive
simulations. Now AMD wants to tap Clearspeed to provide a math
co-processor for their forthcoming quad-core Opteron, a combination that
would provide some serious compute bandwidth for scientific computing.
</quote>

 

[Johannes]

This news item is a few days old, but I don't think it's been mentioned
in either newsgroup.

AMD considers Clearspeed math co-processor
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060315-6392.html

<quote Hannibal>
It has been over a year since I last reported on Clearspeed, the company
that made waves on the hardware scene in 2003 with a massively parallel
floating-point processor aimed at accelerating math-intensive
simulations. Now AMD wants to tap Clearspeed to provide a math
co-processor for their forthcoming quad-core Opteron, a combination that
would provide some serious compute bandwidth for scientific computing.
</quote>

It sounds interesting, but we probably need some more info about this. Years
ago I did a project on a massively parallel computer, but each processor
was only 1 bit. The 1024 processors were organized on a 32x32 grid with easy
(1 cycle) communication along rows and columns. This was fine if the problem
matched the architecture e.g. computation on large dense matrices. But not
so good if the problem was mostly serial. The first part of a computation
was always to create data structures that took advantage of the parallelism.
This 'setting up' part itself was mostly serial. Similarly, after the
massively parallel computation, the data must be put back into the order
for normal interpretation. All this is akin to an aircraft's take off and
landing; it isn't worth while unless you can fly a fair distance.