IBM's Eight-Core, 4-GHz Power7 Chip

pacopico writes "The first details on IBM's upcoming Power7 chip have emerged. The Register is reporting that IBM will ship an eight-core chip running at 4.0 GHz. The chip will support four threads per core and fit into some huge systems. For example, University of Illinois is going to house a 300,000-core machine that can hit 10 petaflops. It'll have 620 TB of memory and support 5 PB/s of memory bandwidth. Optical interconnects anyone?"

Comments

Re:I have a serious question:

[Anonymous Coward]

The applications that are going to be run on this type of machine are designed to be run on this kind of machine.

Re:Toasty.

[smart.id]

There's a difference between scientists and the mainstream media's coverage of that science. And I don't speak for jmorris here, but that just might be what he's satirizing.

Re:I have a serious question:

[JebusIsLord]

A couple things:

x86 chips today are 99% RISC-like (the term RISC is rarely uses today, since basically no modern CPUs are "pure RISC" in design (reduced as in not even having a multiply instruction, like older SPARCs). Sure the exposed architecture is ugly x86, but that's the compiler's job to worry about, not yours. It doesn't really affect the chip performance. Don't forget x86 chips are still the fastest out there, despite the weird interface)

Also, for Joe Sixpack, 64-bit is pointless - especially when the 32-bit version works on the same OS! If you recompile a program as 64-bit (and often that is all there is to it; a recompile), you'll notice that the binaries are larger. In fact, most pointers (memory addresses) now takes up twice the space, so your program also uses more memory. The benefit? Unless your app uses more than around 3GB of RAM, basically zero (On x86 there is a sometimes a slight performance benefit, not because 64-bits is "faster" or anything, but because AMD added some more registers to the x86-64 spec).

Anyhow, i generally view 64-bits as a waste of address space, UNLESS you're accessing large amounts of memory (>3GB per program!). This will be more of a concern in the next few years, but there isn't any rush. I use 64-bit Vista for development (Because I have 4GB of RAM) but otherwise probably wouldn't care. Even Visual Studio (the dev platform for 64-bit code) is mostly a 32-bit app, nor should they change it.

Re:PPC Linux

[Doc Ruby]

No, that is not a problem. Linux, including Ubuntu, has been running on PS3 since the PS3 was released. Every Ubuntu since 6.10 has run on it. And current releases of other Linux (PPC) distros usually do install, especially the Yellow Dog that is the one officially supported by Sony. But the problem is that the Ubuntu team has too few developers, and new features in Ubuntu releases break the installation in ways that the small Cell/PPC team can't keep up with.

Also, there's nothing really "puny" about the Cell's PPC core, which is a 3.2GHz dual-hyperthread Power core.

The Cell/Linux platform has already got video drivers that offload graphics from the PPC to the DSPs the same way most distros run graphics on separate VGA chips. It's a little buggy, in beta, but that's why the project just needs more developers. Not more FUD.

I don't think you really know anything about how Linux actually runs on the Cell, on the PS3. I think you're just repeating the most whiny posts about it you've heard. Because the reality is very different from what you describe, even if it's still got problems. Problems that don't require waiting for more x86 HW revisions, but rather just a little more work on the Cell Linux that Ubuntu is releasing.

Re:Toasty.

[TapeCutter]

Take a deep breath, the scientists won the science argument years ago and apart from quoting the economic 'alarmist' solution there is nothing technically wrong in his sarcastic generalizations. I have been posting on slashdot for ~8yrs defending the scientific strength of the IPCC's reports but I can still manage to appreciate well thought out sarcasm.

BTW: If you think a post is clueless then put some information in your reply, AC ad-homs won't convince anyone of anything except perhaps that your a witless arsehole.