Though it's more customary to celebrate a 10-year anniversary than an 11-year one, we compare the Top 500 Supercomputer List from the summer that Ars was born to the latest iteration of the list. Some things have changed very little, but other aspects are radically different.
The Summer 2009 edition of the twice-yearly Top 500 Supercomputer List is out, and there are some notable changes in this latest version. In terms of the perennial Intel/AMD horse race, after a period of holding steady at roughly 12 percent, AMD's Opteron has resumed its decline as a total share of the processor families represented. AMD dropped from 12.2 percent six months ago to 8.6 percent on the current list, while Intel's Xeons climbed from 73.6 percent to 78.6 percent.
Part of AMD's decline is probably due to the fact that Cray, which sells the Opteron-based XT5 line, saw its vendor share decline from 4.6 percent to 4 percent. But Intel has also benefited from the rapid uptake of its quad-core Xeons, with quad-core processors overall now present in 383 of the systems on the list.
Intel processors—including Itaniums—alone now account for over 79 percent of the CPU presence on the list. Interestingly, when Ars first started back in the summer of 1998, Intel had 1.6 percent of the processors on the list, with x86 coming in at only 0.20 percent. Raise your hand if in 1998 you would've believed that x86 processors would account for 87.2 percent (Intel x86 and AMD combined) of the Top 500 list eleven years out. Yeah, I didn't think so.
In fact, while we're looking at old yearbook pictures from the class of '98, Sun and SGI had 22.2 and 18.6 percent of the vendor share, respectively. Sun is down to 1 percent, and SGI is at 4 percent. The years have not been kind to the former quarterback and prom queen
