Most Significant Tech Announcement/Release of the year.

[Billy Pilgrim]

What do you think is the most significant tech announcement/release that was made this year that you think will have the most long term impact?

[Guest]

Ryzen 3000 or AMD Navi. Using 7nm transistors lets AMD really boost the performance of their cards.

[Amazonsucks]

I think there are two. IBM Summit and Sierra taking the #1 and #2 spots on the Top500 List and the HPCG List(finally dethroned the K Computer even though K is 3x more efficient 5% vs 1.5% for the IBM systems).

 

Why? They are the most advanced heterogeneous pre exascale computers and the most powerful supercomputers in the world. They will undoubtedly pave the way for US exascale computing.

 

And the prototype of the Fujitsu Post K Computer which will be using 7nm 48+2 core ARM A64FX chips being shown as well as its Tofu D interconnect being finally revealed.

 

It will likely have a more significant impact than any other supercomputer since its predecessor, which is still doing amazing work and ranked 3rd for HPCG despite being almost 10x less FLOPS than other newer systems it beats.

 

Whys it important? Post K is a no compromise solution to exascale: homogeneous all CPU, no accelerators like GPUs or DSPs to "cheat". Japan also invested $1.3 billion into the K computer and its six story facility with 12MW cogeneration plant, and the upgrade to Post K is going to be about $1 billion more.