1 |
Commodity microprocessors not only fast but CHEAP
-
Development cost is tens of millions of dollars (5-100M typical)
-
BUT, many more are sold compared to supercomputers
-
Crucial to take advantage of the investment, and use the commodity building block
-
Exotic parallel architectures no more than special-purpose
|
2 |
Multiprocessors being pushed by software vendors (e.g. database) as well as hardware vendors
|
3 |
Standardization by Intel makes small, bus-based SMPs commodity
|
4 |
Desktop: few smaller processors versus one larger one?
|