Updated: There is some chatter – some might call it well-informed speculation – going on out there on the Intertubes that Japanese system maker NEC is shutting down its “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor business. …
Whenever a process shrink is available to chip designers, there are several different levers they can pull to make a more powerful compute engine. …
There are two different Auroras right now in supercomputing. There is the shape-shifting, legendary, and maybe even mythical “Aurora” and now “Aurora A21” exascale supercomputer that was being built by Intel with “Knights” many core processors and now, if Intel can get them out the door, with a combination of “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP processors and “Ponte Vecchio” Xe GPU accelerators, for Argonne National Laboratory. …
Ever since the “Aurora” vector processor designed by NEC was launched last year, we have been wondering if it might be used as a tool to accelerate workloads other than the traditional HPC simulation and modeling jobs that are based on crunching numbers in single and double precision floating point. …
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