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It is so weird that Intel and AMD blew their headstart so badly. I see so many players who come up with ARM implementations that come close or even exceed the p
by whatever1 6y ago
It is so weird that Intel and AMD blew their headstart so badly. I see so many players who come up with ARM implementations that come close or even exceed the performance / energy envelope of Intel/Amd.
- tyingq 6y agoThis one counts as exceeding, at least on some measures. The chip has 1TB/s of memory bandwidth from the 48 cores to its on-package 32GB of memory. Looks like the smallest thing you can buy, though, is a 2U server with 8 sockets, 2 of them populated, for $40k.
- dragontamer 6y agoFujitsu has been making TOP500 supercomputers for years, maybe decades. They're not a small player. They used to make UltraSPARCs, but since Sun / Oracle is a toxic wasteland now, its natural for them to move to ARM instead. The previous Fujitsu supercomputer, the K, was also #1 when it came out in 2011. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer) ----------- The main thing that been proven is that a company like Fujitsu can transition between ISAs: the SPARC ISA into the ARM ISA, and not miss a beat.
- agumonkey 6y agoWhat surprises me, slightly, is how Fujitsu never tried to expand into more markets.
- archi42 6y agoWhich markets exactly? For generic x86, they have server, workstation and blade ranges: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/primergy/ https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/servers/pr... I'm not in that business/role, so I don't know how they compare to e.g. Dell or HP; especially regarding support. But I've got one of their older 1U rackmounts in my basement and it's a pretty nice machine.
- agumonkey 6y agoconsumer / prosumer / workstations is what I had in mind
- jzwinck 6y agoLike this? https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/pc/workstations/celsius-w5010/index.html https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/pc/worksta... And this? https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/pc/desktops/esprimo-d9010/index.html https://www.fujitsu.com/global/products/computing/pc/desktop...
- agumonkey 6y agothen my radar is way too narrow it's been 15 years since I've seen a fujitsu desktop in EU. I mean I regularly see way more panasonic toughbooks around and it's actually rare.
- _trampeltier 6y agoI use at home since many years just Fujitsu Notebooks and also have an W550 workstation. Also for my mom, I bought for her many years ago a Fujitsu Notebook. They come without any bloatware and just run and run forever. The design is nice, I like hiw they have mostly a red line over the device. But they are not cheap to buy. I bought lately an U939X notebook and he is really light, but still everithing (touch and pen) works also with Linux. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hS2uogVMK8U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hS2uogVMK8U
- lovemenot 6y agoThey have tried. Here in Japan they have traditionally had an unassailable position as a domestic champion. The only serious competition was from other domestic companies such as NEC, Hitachi. This model has been very successful for them domestically, but it also makes them uniquely unsuited to competing in global markets where they have no brand to speak of. Another issue is cost vs. quality. Japanese manufacturers including Fujitsu despise low quality and assume their customers are always willing to pay for the best. Don't break things, even if at the expense of moving slow. This assumption generally holds domestically, but not in global markets. What I said above may be changing. But slowly.
- Fnoord 6y agoThat seems like a win-win for the Japanese government (and police, secret service) as well. The rumor was NSA still was going with DEC Alpha fabs long after DECs demise. My government has to buy American/Chinese stuff AFAIK. Housing ASML doesn't give an equal advantage, right?
- lovemenot 6y agoIt's not easy to take available data to confirm or reject such a hypothesis Mr. Fnoord. I would guess this particular iceberg is at least 90% above the surface. It appears to be bog-standard industrial policy which in large part does not necessitate secret stuff. I make this conjecture partly by reference to other industries in Japan, whose comparable government support could certainly not be explained in that way.
- ksec 6y agoI dont follow the PC market as closely now, but they used to compete in PC market. And they were All Made in Japan. The problem with PC market is how they trained consumers into buying Spec. At first people would compare clock speed, and Memory capacity, later they learned CPU Generation was also important and Memory Speed, and then dozens of other things. And basically becomes a commodity market. Nearly ALL PC manufacture moved their assembly to China. Fujitsu remained MIJ for as long as I could remember ( And may be that is still the case ). There is also a culture problem. Which I think matter a lot more as they are factored into their decision making.
- lovemenot 6y agoYep, they still make PCs in Kawasaki factory. Along with servers, phones, network switches etc. PCs and mobile devices have recently been moved into separate subsidiaries. Presumably ahead of a divestiture / major reorg.
- tyingq 6y agoFujitsu does still sell general purpose Sparc servers, they were historically better engineered than Sun's own servers.
- trasz 6y agoFujitsu also did it with IBM mainframes, providing “clones” that outperformed their IBM counterparts.
- ksec 6y agoWow. People may dislike IBM for all sort of reason ( Mostly Software ). But the IBM mainframes technology should certainly be something to be marvelled at. If Fujitsu really did out engineered IBM counterparts, that would be an astonishing achievement.
- trasz 6y agoHere’s the story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_Corporation
- gnufx 6y agoIf they're better engineered than Sun's, it's impressive.
- gnufx 6y ago"toxic wasteland" isn't the reason they gave for moving to Arm, though I don't have a reference to hand. I'm not sure about not missing a beat; as a component of Fukagu, this represents years of serious engineering. Sure, there's no great problem running typical HPC software on aarch64 or ppc64le per se, given suitable BLAS etc.
- djmips 6y agoTo a certain extent it's always been about bandwidth. Everyone is using the same memory technology.
- dragontamer 6y agoFujitsu's previous "K" supercomputer was #1 on TOP500 and GREEN500 when it came out. Heck, it was #1 on Green500 for many, many years after its release. K held #1 on HPCG from 2011 through 2018. Fujitsu just has good tech. Its kind of mysterious since its aimed at the Japanese market instead of the US market, so we don't hear much about it. But its clearly a world-class processor company.
- linksnapzz 6y agoMy impression is that the Fujitsu K-machine && NEC SX-ACE equipment is designed, built, and sold almost exclusively for the Japanese market; courtesy of massive subsidies from the Japanese gov’t for the purpose of maintaining that expertise in-country.
- gnufx 6y agoK was basically a one-off, but you could buy systems with similar technology, though they weren't common outside Japan. A64FX machines are appearing in the West now. There was a recent substantial award for one to a UK academic/Met Office consortium, in which there's some interest.
- linksnapzz 6y agoYeah, by K-machine I mean any of the PrimeHPC-FX class systems using SPARC64-V derivatives; I'm sure they sold a few outside Japan, but I don't think that not having the wider global market would've deterred Fujitsu from making them. I know some of Fujitsu's A64 modules were making it into Cray systems as well; isn't that what U. Bristol has?
- 6y ago
- ChuckMcM 6y agoAs I see it, Intel and AMD see the super computer market as "niche" and while it gives good publicity, there are perhaps 1 or 2 such machines sold each year. As a result they spend their time and "innovation beans" on things that make desktop and laptop computers more desirable. IBM's Power architecture is another computer ecosystem that is really innovative and cool but you hardly hear about it. Different target markets. The second part of the issue is "head start." For literally decades the "cost" of a computer architecture was perhaps 3% chips and 97% software support for those chips. The "Windows" lock (by having the #1 OS run only on x86 architecture machines) meant that Intel really didn't have to do anything for years but shrink their transistor size and they could "win." Linux took away the Windows "moat", networking took away the "enterprise server" moat, and gcc took away the "compiler/tools" moat. Between the three of them it gave everyone a chance to play if they wanted to stake out a niche. ARM took "low power" and captured phones for which battery power is key. By licensing the architecture widely and inexpensively they enabled parallel investment that well exceeded anything a single manufacturer could apply to a particular architecture. By some estimates you have over $50 billion dollars / year being spent on R&D that accelerates ARM compared to Intel's $15 billion R&D budget for 2020? Not so much "blowing their head start" as is it getting mowed down by not being able to invest as much as the other guys.
- bhouston 6y agoIt used to be a big deal when intel machines started to show up and then rule the supercomputer benchmarks. It used to be all specialized chips like IBM Power. It was when Intel was ascendant. Now ARM is doing the same thing. Arm is attacking Intel at the top and bottom and middle leaving less and less space for them to operate. Intel lost embedded to arm first. Then the lost mobile. Then they lost the Apple laptops and later this year the Apple desktops. They are starting to lose the super computers. The nail in the coffin will come with the cloud servers if those vendors could get something close to Apple’s custom Arm cpu performance.
- ori_b 6y agoThis worries me. Intel was never very clean, but it's so much more open than every other option. There's even complete GPU documentation.