[Beowulf] Is there really a need for Exascale?

[Mark Hahn]

>> than say a typical modern PC CPU.. But, given appropriate software, is it
>> a better $/FLOPS or W/FLOPS deal to get 100 cellphone CPUs or 1 superduper
>> PC CPU?
>
> The classical CPU core seems to be regressing to the role of a co-processor,
> and real heavy lifting is being done with OpenCL, a la APU.

my colleagues who attended SC12 say that OpenCL was almost entirely
absent (along with AMD :( ).  it's not clear how generally applicable
Cuda's SIMT programming model is.  and having it as a separate ISA
(versus traditional cores) is a problem, complexity-wise.

> GPU into every mobile device CPU. As it's memory starved, there's already
> memory stacking http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+A6+Teardown/10528/1?singlePage
> I presume Exynos 5 teardown would not look much different.

samsung has been producing stacked chips for quite a while - 
back to at least the a5 generation, probably before that
(stacked dram, stacked flash too I think.)

> The interesting part about forthcoming real (TSV) stacking
> that you can mix hybrid memories, whether SRAM, MRAM, DRAM, flash,
> as you don't have to be process compatible as with true embedded
> memory (though MRAM might well be process compatible with CPUs).

stacking is great, but not that much different from MCMs, is it?