Quote Originally Posted by AAbenson View Post
what i really dont understand is if the Bulldozer cpus are really that bad then why was Cray so eager to use these chips in its new supercomputers?

Well, Cray won the deal on those supercomputers when AMD probably didn't even had silicon in hand. Cray has to supply at a certain date a certain number of FLOPs. On each, you have a penalty for missing the target. Penalty is ussually in the millions $. Cray commited based on AMD assurances ( contract between Cray and AMD, AMD at the time could not forsee things will be that s**y ).

With BD failling, Cray still had to deliver on time. From what I've read, AMD had delivered tens of thousands of Interlagos already to Cray for the deal. It didn't matter they were probably power hungry and couldn't clock very high ( older steppings ), Cray needed the 1st to work reliable even if slower just to make the deadline. As for the performance penalties, AMD will cough up the difference. I wouldn't be surprised if Cray got the CPUs for free.

Why are people interested in Interlagos ? Because in HPC, AMD carved a niche for having the highest Flops/$ with Magny Cours. BD was supposed to improve on that with FMA. So to a few customers Interlagos makes sense. The question is whether they will keep some faith in AMD or ask for Intel powered systems in the future from Cray considering this is the 2nd major screwup after Barcelona ( Cray promised 2.5Ghz Barcelonas and had to ship with 2GHz TLB bugged ones ).