PEZY Computing, a Japanese firm that makes the top three most efficient supercomputers in the world, according to the Green500 list, announced that it will integrate Imagination's highly efficient 64-bit I6400 CPUs into its many-core architecture.
The PEZY SC-2 will be PEZY's next-generation system, which will increase the 1024 core count of the first generation PEZY SC to 4096 cores, or four times more. PEZY's many-core accelerator has been combined with Intel CPUs from top supercomputers to significantly increase their efficiency for computing tasks. For instance, the Shoubo supercomputer, which uses Haswell XEON CPUs and PEZY SC many-core accelerators, was able to break the world record with 7 GFLOPS/W performance.
In the November edition of Green500, the top 23 supercomputers used a heterogeneous architecture with many-core accelerators. In the updated June edition of this year, that number increased by 40 percent, and now the top 32 supercomputers are using many-core accelerators. These supercomputers all use accelerators from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and PEZY. The current top three supercomputers are manufactured by PEZY Computing and Exascaler Inc, and include Haswell or Ivy Bridge Xeons as well as PEZY many-core accelerators.
Motoaki Saito, M.D., Ph.D., PEZY founder, president and CEO, said: “Imagination's industry leading technologies, combined with its vision for the future, make it an ideal partner for us as we take our innovations to the next level. To address important emerging opportunities in areas such as supercomputing and artificial intelligence, we are building a long-term strategic alliance with Imagination that we believe will change the HPC world and offer disruptive solutions in many other application areas as well." He added that “the forthcoming PEZY-SC2 will be quite powerful, unique and still energy efficient thanks to Imagination's 64-bit MIPS Warrior CPUs and its flexible configuration offered to PEZY. PEZY-SC2 powered by Imagination's 64-bit MIPS Warrior CPUs will be more than a game changing processor in many ways and we are looking forward to propelling the technology advancements in the HPC world."
SoC designers can make chips with up to 64 clusters of hexacore I6400 CPUs, and each core can also have up to four threads. The multithreading feature is especially important in many-core architectures that use in-order cores (such as the I6400), to avoid stalling the processing of instructions. Imagination's I6400 CPUs also support 128-bit SIMD instructions and hardware virtualization (up to 256 virtual guest operating systems).
HPC designers who prefer out-of-order cores can use Imagination's recently announced P6600 CPU, which comes with much higher single-threaded performance than the I6400 and "best in class" branch prediction.
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Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.
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