Greg Pfister writes in his blog post that everyone has heard something of the large, public, flame war that erupted between Intel and Nvidia about whose product is or will be superior: Intel Larrabee, or Nvidia’s CUDA platforms.

There have been many detailed analyses posted about details of these, such as who has (or will have) how many FLOPS, how much bandwidth per cycle, and how many nanoseconds latency when everything lines up right. Of course, all this is “peak values,” which still means “the values the vendor guarantees you cannot exceed” (Jack Dongarra’s definition), and one can argue forever about how much programming genius or which miraculous compiler is needed to get what fraction of those values.

The author believes that the elephant in the room has been ignored. He thinks a key point, if not the key point, is that this is an issue of MIMD (Intel Larrabee) vs. SIMD (Nvidia CUDA).

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