With the International Supercomputing Conference underway in Portland, Oregon, the world's leading processor manufacturers are all laying claim to supercomputing supremacy.
GPU-giant NVIDIA has unveiled new Tesla cards based on its Fermi architecture, whilst AMD now tops the bi-annual Top 500 Supercomputer list. The list, made available today, highlights that four of the five top systems AMD chips.
Encouraging news for Intel's main rival, but the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer isn't about to be undone as easily as that, and has itself announced that a record-breaking 402 of the world's top 500 systems are equipped with an Intel processor. That's just over a massive 80 per cent.
According to the 34th Top 500 list, 20 of the top 50 systems are powered by Intel, and 379 systems feature a quad-core Xeon processor.
To celebrate the news, Intel has announced that it will launch a High Performance Computing (HPC) optimised version of its forthcoming Nehalem-EX processor. Featuring six-cores (as opposed to eight), Intel will be able to run the chip at higher frequencies, enabling it to better suit HPC workloads.
The parallel processing threat from GPU giants continues to loom near, but Intel still remains a key ingredient to the vast majority of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Intel's dominance is likely to go unchallenged until the launch of AMD's next-generation processors, codenamed Magny-Cours.