Re:Parallella: Raspberry Pi-like open parallel computing har...
by wmf on Thursday September 27, 2012 @08:04PM
(#4583583)
For Linpack it has been demonstrated that GPUs and MIC are more energy-efficient than server x86, although Blue Gene beats them all. http://www.green500.org/lists/green201206&green500from=1...
Re:Parallella: Raspberry Pi-like open parallel computing har...
by iyulaev on Thursday September 27, 2012 @08:34PM
(#4583716)
I'm certainly not going to argue against GPUs (or FPGAs) being used in scientific applications where performance is limited by floating point or vector performance. In certain scientific applications they can hand general-purpose CPUs their butts. I'm talking about ARM/RISC vs x86 CPUs for server applications.
Re:Parallella: Raspberry Pi-like open parallel computing har...
by wmf on Thursday September 27, 2012 @10:40PM
(#4584057)
Sorry, I went on a tangent there. The benefits of wimpy cores have certainly been elusive. Some good links
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/trishulc/paper...
http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...
The CISC vs. RISC days are long over and the battle between the two architectures is a bit silly at this point since the gap between the instruction set and the underlying implementation has gotten quite dramatic. Claims that RISC chips are inherently more efficient may have been true in 1995, but I don't see this holding water today.