Cheap Chips Aid Movement To Develop Supercomputers

June 24, 2003 | Source: Wall Street Journal

New chips from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. could accelerate the pace of building powerful computers from inexpensive components.

The latest trend is to use building blocks from personal computers and inexpensive servers, including Intel Pentium or Xeon microprocessors and standard accessory chips, to create “commodity” clusters, such as the MCR Linux Cluster Xeon 2.4 install at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ranking number 3 on the TOP500 List of supercomputers.

Intel and AMD are vying to dominate the emerging 64-bit chip market, with Intel’s Itanium (and the coming Madison) vs. AMD’s Opteron chips.