Intel and AMD don’t agree on much very often these days, but the two companies are in lock step on one issue: they can compete and offer scalable performance in the high performance computing (HPC) arena, despite findings to the contrary.

A recent report in the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) publication IEEE Spectrum found that multi-core processors are not the best solution in some HPC scenarios. The problem, uncovered by engineers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, home of the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, is the connection between the CPU and memory.

Intel said it is addressing the issue in its TeraScale 80-core chip. “Intel’s work on stacking memory could be key to resolving long term multicore memory bottlenecks, but this was not discussed in the article,” said an Intel spokesperson in a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com.

“We’ve been talking in public about the need to integrate memory closer to processors for more than two years now; showing directionally what will need to happen. We are confident that the industry will work around the memory bandwidth issue, currently there are very fast memory bandwidth subsystems, but reasonable cost as well as performance needs to be achieved,” the statement went on to say.

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