Rambus Inc. IP in Roadrunner

ITJungle reports that IBM won a contract to build a 1.6 petaflops hybrid supercomputer for the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The supercomputer, code-named "Roadrunner", is expected to be the fastest supercomputer in the world when it is completed late 2007 or early 2008.

Roadrunner will be based on both Opteron X64 processors from Advanced Micro Devices and Cell PowerPC processing elements from IBM.

The Cell chip consists of a 64-bit PowerPC core that has had its out-of-order execution elements removed; it has 64 KB of L1 cache (split evenly between data and instruction caches), 512 MB of on-chip L2 cache, and an integrated Rambus XDR main memory controller. Each Cell also has eight co-processors, which IBM calls synergistic processor units, which are vector math units that are used to boost video and other media processing.

Hat tip to FinzToRite for the link.