HPC won't be an x86 monoculture forever – and it's starting to show

Feature Remember when high-performance computing always seemed to be about x86? Exactly a decade ago, almost nine in ten supercomputers in the TOP500 (a list of the beefiest machines maintained twice yearly by academics) were Intel-based. Today, it's down to 57 percent.

Intel might once have ruled the HPC roost but its influence is waning. Today, other processors are making significant inroads.

Supercomputing development has evolved in waves since Cray pioneered vector processors (which were excellent at conducting single operations across large data sets) in the mid-1970s.

Later came reduced instruction set chip (RISC) architectures with chips like the 64-bit DEC Alpha, IBM POWER, Sun/Fujitsu SPARC, SGI MIPS, and HP PA-RISC. Each offered distinct performance characteristics. Their simpler instruction sets made for fast instruction decoding and pipelining, and also served more general-purpose use cases than vector-based systems.

The coming of the commodity cluster

The problem for RISC was ...