Sunday April 29, 2007 HPC Wire opines that memory bandwidth is still key to scaling performance:
"The biggest impediment to scale-up is the memory wall. Since SMP systems, by definition, share a common memory space, the data bandwidth into each processor, and then each core, is limited by memory system performance. As more cores compete for memory, each one has proportionally less bandwidth available to it. Memory technology isn't standing still, but RAM has only been doubling in speed every 10 years, well behind the 18-month Moore's Law doubling rate that is driving the multicore phenomenon. Technologies on the horizon to speed up memory access include 3D chip stacking (IBM), on-chip photonics (Intel) and proximity communication (Sun Microsystems). Whether any of these proves to be a practical solutions remains to be seen. But in the short term, the memory wall will act as a barrier to unconstrained SMP scale-up." Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( April 29, 2007 05:00 AM ) PermalinkComments are closed for this entry.
