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