Perspectives from SC22

Throughout the year, Hyperion Research uses our surveys to ask buyers about near-term expectations for their spending on HPC. We ask whether, in the next quarter, they expect the amount they spend to increase, decrease or stay the same. If they expect spending to go up or down in the next quarter, we ask by what percentage. The questions and resulting data are not limited to servers but also include anticipated spending on cloud usage and on desktop computers. We then use this data collected over multiple quarters, along with historical revenue patterns and other sources, to help us generate our HPC market forecasts.

Since the dawn of the Supercomputer Era in the 1960s, a succession of base processors (CPUs) has attempted to satisfy HPC users' nearly insatiable demands for fast solution times on a wide spectrum of challenging problems, combined with affordability and energy efficiency. Chief among these entrants were vector processors, which ruled the HPC market through the 1990s, then RISC processors, and then x86-based processors, which began their steep ascendancy at that time and continue to dominate the market today, often in tandem with GPUs or other accelerators.