Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on November 27, 2013 3:53 am wrote:
> If rumors about 72 Silvermont-derived cores running at 2.67 GHz are true, then the resulting
> chip will have no advantages over existing SPARC-T5 in commercial loads, neither in single-thread
> speed, nor in throughput (there may be ~50% advantage on embarrassingly parallel workloads
> with very high L2 hit rates, but not on anything even remotely real-world) nor in TDP. But
> it will be at serious disadvantage in memory capacity and SMP scalability.
>

It's the rental market. The aim is neither best-in-the-class performance or the most optimal configuration. You're just trying to get acceptable performance in as many usage scenarios you can to maximize utilization. When a machine isn't working, you're idling not just the processor but all the other hardware surrounding it. Since demand for HPC is volatile, the ability to run commodity software gives firms a way to balance out the risk.