14 DAY TRIAL // The future Cray Rainier supercomputer, scheduled for 2007/8, will be powered by AMD's new enhanced core dubbed K8L, which is said to be up to 40% more efficient than the previous Opteron K8 platform. The supercomputer will presumably integrate the future AMD server CPU codenamed Altair Quad, Badhardware reports.
Another "under-development" supercomputer is the Black Widow, which should yield 120 Tflops and include 40 TB of RAM and 400 TB storage capacity. However, Cray Rainier is expected to deliver a 250 Tflops of computing power and this is clearly influenced by the inclusion of quad core Opterons.
Altair quad cores were actually planned for the AM3 socket release in 3Q2007, but AMD recently announced that the AM3 socket is to be postponed for 2H 2008. It looks like K8L is a backward compatible socket and will only need a BIOS update. In order to avoid Intel's Prescott failure regarding the simultaneous introduction of new geometry and enhanced core at the same time, AMD is planning to release K8L architecture in 3Q 2007 so it could fit the 65 nm shrink of the K8 cores.
AMD roadmap for the years to come clearly points out to core clocks as high as 3,5 Ghz for the Altair CPU's. Technically speaking, that 40% performance gain for the Altair CPU is due to a 25% clock raise combined with a 15% boost from architectural improvements. Altair CPUs will also support 512 KB x 4 L2 Cache, 2 MB Shared L3 Cache and the future Hyper Transport 3.0 architecture.