Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers

“With no other way to improve the performance of processors
further, chip makers have staked their future on putting more and
more processor cores on the same chip. Engineers at Sandia National
Laboratories, in New Mexico, have simulated future high-performance
computers containing the 8-core, 16‑core, and 32-core
microprocessors that chip makers say are the future of the
industry. The results are distressing. Because of limited memory
bandwidth and memory-management schemes that are poorly suited to
supercomputers, the performance of these machines would level off
or even decline with more cores. The performance is especially bad
for informatics applications—data-intensive programs that are
increasingly crucial to the labs’ national security
function.”

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