djos wrote:In general desktop computing using standard FPU/Vector measurements Intel chips are faster but AMD powered HPC clusters generally use the "Fusion" style CPU-GPU chips now and the GPU elements are dramatically faster than Intel's traditional Xeon CPU's for HPC work!
Sorry, but no - and I have to correct this because it sounds like something that has been pulled off a marketing site with people shouting "Well said!" in reply because they don't know what they're talking about and think they're getting back at someone - as is normal around here.
Very specific operations are hived off to GPUs (the dominant framework in that area these days is Nvidia's CUDA) these days but the heavy computational lifting is all still done by the CPU. Of more primary importance than even the single-threaded performance of the CPU though is the speed of the on-chip memory controller, and Intel have long since eclipsed AMD in that area. You're still moving around unbelievable amounts of data across a bus and that's where the platform really counts. There is no point shoving data through a GPU when your memory controller is the bottleneck............
Put simply, if you were building a cluster these days you can only sensibly build it on Intel platforms (I hate it, but there it is) and you'd use Nvidia or even AMD's graphics units to offset what operations you can. The above makes it sound like you can simply offload everything on to the GPU and it will magically all be faster and the CPU and its platform doesn't matter. Total rubbish.
I can guarantee you Red Bull will have started moving what they had in 2009 on, if they already haven't moved all of it. Time is money, and a lot of it, in this business.