Parts/CPUs/NEC SX-6 vector processor
Why this part
The Earth Simulator was the last machine to take the top of the list on a purpose-built vector architecture, and it did so by a factor of nearly five over the best American system, which caused enough alarm in Washington to be given a name: the Computenik moment. The reason it worked is that climate and seismic codes stream long contiguous arrays, which is precisely the access pattern a vector pipeline is built for and precisely the one that defeats a cache. Its successors were beaten not on that workload but on price: 5,120 custom vector processors cost what tens of thousands of commodity parts did not.
Systems using this part
- Systems
- 2
- Rmax underneath
- 36.11 TFlop/s
- Units recorded
- 5,120
| System | Role | Country | Units | System Rmax | Supplied by | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPTEC NEC SX-6 2002-12 | CPU | Brazil | - | 253.6 GFlop/s | NEC | #459 → |
| Earth Simulator 2002-03 | CPU | Japan | 5,120 | 35.86 TFlop/s | NEC | #1 → |
“Units recorded” sums only the edges where a public source states a quantity. It is a floor, not a total, and should never be read as installed base.