Cell 2 discussed shortly

[ADEX]

Cell2 (the full Double Precision version) is due to be discussed at Coolchips X next week.

I wrote up an article and posted it on my site, we know some things already (it's been discussed for over a year) and I tried to figure out the rest here.

Enjoy

 

[SPM]

Regarding the reason for including the Opterons in the Roadrunner architecture, I remember reading somewhere that the reason was because the customer specified that it should be able to run existing HPC Opteron applications which the customer already had without recompilation (at lower performance), or with only recompilation of some libraries.

Cray is talking about something similar

http://www.cray.com/about_cray/news_events/articles/HPCwire_AdaptiveSC.pdf
Adaptive supercomputing combines multiple processing architectures into a
single scalable system. From the user's point of view, one has the application
program, which uses libraries, tools, compilers, scheduling system management
and a runtime system. Then comes the adaptive software, a compiler, which
knows what types of processors are available on the heterogeneous system and
targets code to the most appropriate processor. In certain cases, at run-time, the
system will determine the most appropriate processor for running a piece of
code, and direct the execution accordingly. As Scott said: "Adapt the system to
the application - not the application to the system."

Sounds like the idea is to run an Opteron HPC application with only recompilation of a limited number of standard libraries which handle the bulk of the number crunching.