“This is some serious power—not only being produced, but being consumed.”
Yes. Almost 10 MW for the top system now. It’s impressive at almost 1/2 million cores, but (so far) isn’t using the heterogeneous approach of adding GPU processing.
NVIDIA may become a major player in supercomputing between GPU accelerators and high-end ARM processors, which it is also going to push for desktop use. The ARM architecture is quite power efficient, and would seem to be a natural fit for these massively parallel machines.
It will be more than a little ironic if Windows supports the new NVIDIA ARM RISC processors while Apple sticks with Intel... LOL
Well, at 548,000+ cores, I'd say it's got more than a half million cores. :)
And according to this PDF (Page 10), The way it manages on-chip cache probably makes up for it's lack of GPU usage.
And the new interconnect model it's using is pretty sweet. After looking through the specs, I don't actually see any internal switches being used, but it's pushing out 100GB/s per core.