New Fujitsu SoC designs shrink supers' power slurp

Fujitsu is pimping system-on-chip (SoC) designs for two new supers it says get 40 per cent more processing punch while slurping half as much power. The company also says its GS21 2400 and GS21 2600 need 70 per cent less data centre space. The SoC devices at the heart of the two servers consolidate 14 chipsets, Fujitsu says. …

[Kiralexi]

Not supercomputers - not even close

These are proprietary mainframe processors, not supercomputer chips. There's a very, very big difference there...

[Roo]

Re: Not supercomputers - not even close

"These are proprietary mainframe processors, not supercomputer chips. There's a very, very big difference there..."

Err, if they get put in super computers they are "supercomputer chips", in exactly the same way that Intel Xeons, AMD Opterons and GPUs are...

Why do you think those Fujitsu chips are less supercomputery than an Opteron slotted into a Cray XK7 ?

[Kiralexi]

Re: Not supercomputers - not even close

They don't get put in supercomputers. The last paragraph is referring to something completely different (the SPARC-based Post-FX10 processor) which *is* a supercomputer processor, but the GS21 chips mentioned in the first several paragraphs are legacy 31-bit processors for mainframes; high compute performance is not (and hasn't been for decades) a major concern for these systems. The focus is on reliability and long-term binary compatibility, not compute performance.

[Roo]

Re: Not supercomputers - not even close

"...the GS21 chips mentioned in the first several paragraphs are legacy 31-bit processors for mainframes"

Thanks for the schooling (have an upvote). :)

The latent pedant that lies neglected within me would like it known that I did preface my twaddle with an 'if'...