Economics

• 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

• Multiprocessors being pushed by software vendors (e.g. database) as well as hardware vendors

• Standardization by Intel makes small, bus-based SMPs commodity

• Desktop: few smaller processors versus one larger one?

  • Multiprocessor on a chip

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