News US Government's Aurora Supercomputer Delayed Due to Intel’s 7nm Setback

[Admin]

The Department of Energy confirmed the delay of the Aurora supercomputer.

US Government's Aurora Supercomputer Delayed Due to Intel’s 7nm Setback : Read more

 

[whatisupthere]

Too bad they didn't pick EPYC. Would likely be right on schedule

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Too bad they didn't pick EPYC. Would likely be right on schedule

Because Ponte Vicchio is the delay, not Sapphire Rapids? The only potential fix that wouldn't have resulted in delays would be using Nvidia A100, or maybe an AMD RDNA2 chip.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Please cancel Intel's contract and go with AMD or IBM

 

[Co BIY]

At this level the customer (government) has so much power that they have to make a deliberate choice to keep competitive players in the business or they will not be able to have competition for their contracts in the future and maybe even no bidders if a sole source gets damaged by some event.

One solution is a "spread the wealth" system of contracts to multiple vendors. They compete for them but the decision makers make sure everyone wins some.

 

[Jimbojan]

Intel's Aurora system is likely 30 - 40% more power efficient than AMD's, thus in a 3-4 months time, Aurora may save the country for the cost of AMD's system ( 2.5 - 3 Million watts power ), it is worth the wait.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Intel's Aurora system is likely 30 - 40% more power efficient than AMD's, thus in a 3-4 months time, Aurora may save the country for the cost of AMD's system ( 2.5 - 3 Million watts power ), it is worth the wait.

I'm not sure anyone can say that with any degree of certainty right now. AMD's 7nm Zen 2 parts are better efficiency and performance per watt than Intel's current parts. Will SuperFin close the gap? Perhaps. Nvidia's A100 parts are high performance but also very high power (up to 400W each), while AMD's alternative GPUs are not yet released in any form. I 'm sure one of the designs for a next-gen supercomputer will be more efficient -- either Frontier or Aurora -- but we're probably two years away from knowing which one ends up ranking higher on the Green 500.

 

[Avro Arrow]

At this level the customer (government) has so much power that they have to make a deliberate choice to keep competitive players in the business or they will not be able to have competition for their contracts in the future and maybe even no bidders if a sole source gets damaged by some event.

One solution is a "spread the wealth" system of contracts to multiple vendors. They compete for them but the decision makers make sure everyone wins some.

I don't think that's true because I haven't been any Opteronsupercomputers since Titan. Also, Intel is in no danger of going out of business. AMD was in danger of going out of business but the US government wasn't falling all over themselves to give design wins to Bulldozer-based Opterons. I think that they only do things like that with defence contractors because that's often their only source of revenue.

Intel's Aurora system is likely 30 - 40% more power efficient than AMD's, thus in a 3-4 months time, Aurora may save the country for the cost of AMD's system ( 2.5 - 3 Million watts power ), it is worth the wait.

I'd love to see proof of this because AMD has been absolutely crushing Intel when it comes to efficiency and performance-per-watt. Even if Intel does come out with something that's more efficient than AMD has NOW, AMD isn't exactly sitting still and their EPYC architecture makes current Xeons look like overpriced little-league CPUs. Intel hasn't exactly been a hotbed of innovation in the last ten years (to put it mildly) and corporate culture doesn't turn on a dime. Remember that Jim Keller left Intel after a very short amount of time and the rumours are that he hated how rigidly monolithic the corporate culture at Intel is.