14 DAY TRIAL // Intel Corporation announced today that it has signed a deal with Cray Inc. to acquire assets and expertise related to Cray’s famous high-performance computing (HPC) interconnect program.
Cray is probably the world’s most famous and most original supercomputer designer and manufacturer. They’ve built the world’s fastest supercomputers for more than five decades and are experts in interconnecting servers, blades or racks with highly efficient technologies.
In the supercomputing business this is probably the most important aspect: the efficiency and creativity of the interconnect technology.
Back in 2003, AMD’s Opteron was the best server processor in the world and everybody wanted Opteron processors in their servers, and especially in their supercomputers.
AMD’s Opteron also had two huge advantages over what Intel had then: at least 40% more computing performance and a fast Direct Connect interface to interlink the CPUs.
At that time, Intel was in the business of bribing and strong arming OEMs and distributors into buying its lower performing CPUs and not to buy, nor sell AMD based systems. There was much talk about Intel’s monopolistic practices at the time both in the USA and the European Union.
Later, Intel was even fined €1 billion in Europe for such practices, and had to pay a direct 1.25 billion US dollars to AMD to settle any dispute.
The amount of bribery was so great that DELL, an exclusive Intel OEM, was receiving more money directly from Intel than it was able to obtain as profit from selling its own systems.
As far as supercomputing was concerned, Cray wanted the best the x86 on the market and didn’t care about Intel’s bribes. Cray was competing on government contracts and had to have the best solution.
Opteron processors were superior to Intel’s Xeon offerings for almost 8 years, between 2003 and 2010. Intel was plagued by its slow FSB and AMD had the upper hand with their HyperTransport Links between the CPUs.
Intel is now interested in Cray’s Aries interconnect. Aries is the successor of the award-winning Gemini interconnect that was designed especially for the HyperTransport links in the Opteron CPUs.
As AMD’s performance fell far behind Intel’s, Cray wanted an independent interconnect architecture and not a processor specific one.
Therefore, we have Aries that uses PCI-Express links to pass over data and doesn’t care what processors are used in the server modules.
Cray’s next supercomputer will be Xeon-based and it will be a far departure from Cray’s Opteron based Jaguar Supercomputer that was probably the most famous supercomputer of the last decade.
Jaguar was famous because it became Number 1 three different times with each simple processor upgrade where the CPUs were replaced with newer versions containing more cores.
The money for the research on the interconnect technologies developed at Cray was, in significant part, coming from DARPA and other USA governmental agencies so it’s interesting how Cray sells for a profit something that they’ve made with the governmental funds.
