A recent article in IT Business Edge asks “Do Processors Really Matter Anymore?” There is a statement in the article that got me thinking:
It would seem … that the only users still focusing on clock speeds and overall processing capability are in the HPC market…
To this statement, I tend to disagree. In HPC there is a focus on processors, but not so much on flops per core anymore. There is a real concentration on how to leverage parallel computational resources in order to get your application to run efficiently.
Take a look at my comments over at HPCatDell.com.
What do you think?
Yes. They definitely matter, especially in the highly transactional online environments where web enabled applications are handling hundreds of thousands or even millions of transactions per hour. Compound that with virtualized cloud computing where hundreds of such applications compete for resources and the underlying infrastructure becomes even more critical as a service delivery component.