This genuinely surprised me, but I’m less sure than everyone else that this spells the end of Cray. They’re still cranking out monster systems: they have 3 in the top 10 now (and almost certainly more than that since the DoD stopped listing their systems). As everyone has noted, they also signed contracts for new monsters at Argonne and Oak Ridge, which will likely debut at #2 and #1 respectively.
I think it’s very unlikely that the US government lets them go out of business after HPE closes the sale. They’re the best competitor to IBM, and the DoE and DoD are always careful to spread their procurements around to keep more than one company capable of supplying the big defense/weapons supers. This is just totally a guess from having worked in HPC for so long, but I’d be very surprised if this purchase didn’t include some sort of back channel wink and nod by the feds at a promise by HPE to keep building the big computers.
I’ll miss them though. While their systems weren’t always the best, when you got your problems escalated to their R&D group, you got to work with some cool people. I imagine those people will get sucked into HPE and/or get fed up and defect to Intel pretty quickly.
Look at HP's history. They killed the Alpha when the Alpha was the top processor of its time. Even after the decision to kill the Alpha, the sheer momentum of it led to many Top 500 supercomputers such as ASCI Q.
Why did they kill Alpha? Because of a deal with Intel. HP hasn't made money off of shipping Itanic systems. Compared with where they'd be if they never killed Alpha, they've probably lost billions of dollars.
But financially motivated manipulations are more common than drama in a Korean soap. So will HP do the same thing with Cray? We don't know. They could have some back end dealings with Intel again and we could see inferior Intel-based systems instead of AMD-based. It's easily within the realm of possibility.
Alpha is a painful loss for sure, and the end result for Itanic makes HP look bad. But I guess they were looking at the figures to stay at the top with respect to manufacturing costs going forward at the time, which is just brutal when competing with chips produced in much larger quantities such as x86. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here which Alpha had no chance of recouping, ever. IBM/Power has/had similar challenges.
Does Cray manufacture their own silicon? I did glance through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray including reading the lead, and did the same Google search... while I'm sure I could dig deeper, maybe it's fun to let people here say what they know :)
Unless you’re TSMC, Samsung, Global Foundries, or Chartered, you’re fabless. Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, and many others are doing ok as fabless companies.
It used to be one of the main things they did, but they spun it out into a separate company about 10 years ago.
They were failing to keep up with Intel in fabrication process because of the massive capital and R&D expenditure required. They decided they would be better off having a choice of fab partners instead.
No, they don't design CPUs. They design ASICs that run inside their network. This is the secret sauce that keeps them competitive in HPC environments where latency/bandwidth matter a lot more.
They used to do the whole shebang, back in the day. But it's been a long, long time since that was the case.
I think it’s very unlikely that the US government lets them go out of business after HPE closes the sale. They’re the best competitor to IBM, and the DoE and DoD are always careful to spread their procurements around to keep more than one company capable of supplying the big defense/weapons supers. This is just totally a guess from having worked in HPC for so long, but I’d be very surprised if this purchase didn’t include some sort of back channel wink and nod by the feds at a promise by HPE to keep building the big computers.
I’ll miss them though. While their systems weren’t always the best, when you got your problems escalated to their R&D group, you got to work with some cool people. I imagine those people will get sucked into HPE and/or get fed up and defect to Intel pretty quickly.