It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.
Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the Cold War ended in the late 1980 s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.
Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12, 960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 videogame machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.
Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.
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