What’s El Capitan? And Other Big Data Center Questions – Forbes
If you’re just getting caught up on the most powerful computing models that exist today in America, you may have heard the term Colossus, but not the spanish-language moniker ‘El Capitan.’
While the former is something created by Elon Musk’s XAI company, which I reported on a couple of weeks ago, the latter is a corporate project developed by Hewlett-Packard that outstrips Colossus in terms of pure computational capability.
So how do these two systems stack up?
According to reported data, Colossus has a greater number of GPUs. The system has an estimated 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPU units, all linked together to provide quite a bit of number-crunching or other computation.
By comparison, El Capitan is reported to have 30,000 AMD APUs, and each of these elements has a CPU and GPU in one package.
But what about performance?
Although Colossus’s chip count may be higher, experts give El Capitan the blue ribbon for power. This system provides an estimated 1.742 exaflops or quintillion calculations per second in terms of sustained real-world performance. Colossus is estimated to be able to deliver 6 exaflops in theoretical peak performance. That might look like a bigger number (and it is) but it’s the context that’s important.
For reference, here’s what ChatGPT has to say about it:
Experts generally agree that El Capitan is more powerful for tasks requiring high-precision computations, such as scientific simulations and national security applications.
“In contrast, Colossus excels in AI and machine learning tasks that can leverage its high throughput in single-precision calculations. Therefore, the determination of which is more powerful depends on the specific application and computational requirements.”
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What’s El Capitan? And Other Big Data Center Questions – Forbes, source
