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HPC Becomes Proprietary, says HPC Wire

HPCWire published an article discussing how future HPC architectures will deviate from the classical x86 architecture, thus raising the necessity to deal with increased heterogeneity

The x86 architecture has dominated in particular the commodity HPC market for a long time. About three-quarters of HPC server revenue comes from x86-based systems according to IDC. Companies with proprietary processor architectures have had very little success so far. In order to cater for new accelerator requirements and proprietary needs, designs like the Cray XT/XEs and SGI's Altix UV line use a semi-custom design where x86 silicon is particularly exploited for cost benefits.
As the need for efficiency increases, more and more manufacturers will develop domain specific machines, such as the MDGRAPE-3 machine of the RIKEN research institure in Japan that was designed purely for molecular dynamics.
Read the full article over at HPCWire.