> The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O). Top500 i

> The arrival of Intel (and AMD with the Opteron) on the TOP-500 supercomputer list demonstrated the importance of channel bandwidth (memory and I/O). Top500 is based on the HPL benchmark. Its problems are specifically not being sensitive to memory and networking (specifically network latency). That's why half(?) of it is things like "cloud vendor", where you're not going to run typical HPC codes past three nodes.