Intel Woodcrest to outperform everything else?

A FEW DAYS AGO, a friend told me that the famous Linpack FLOPs benchmark for matrix multiplication, still used (despite its near uselessness in real apps) to rank the world's TOP 500 supercomputers, will run on the Conroe and Woodcrest far better than expected, due to the recent compiler and tuning advances. Basically, a 3GHz Woodcrest chip gives you 3 billion x 4 FP ops x 2 cores per second, or 24 GFLOPS theoretical peak (Rpeak number in Linpack) per socket in 64-bit precision.

So, two chips on a typical workstation or server board give you 48 GFLOPS Rpeak - almost as good as a quad-chip Montecito, or 50% better than dual-chip (four cores total) POWER5+.

With the rumoured improvements, Woodcrest is hitting 80% efficiency in Linpack, i.e. its measurable Rmax rate of execution will be four-fifths of theoretical peak, or over 38 GFLOPs in this case.