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:

[jcarkeys]

You sir, are correct. Most things aren't set to run in parallel and thus don't get the gains. Gains come from optimized code (obviously), but also doing multiple tasks. Leave Photoshop to render an HDR image and play a game, if you want. Though to be fair, it's not "just 1/4th" performance, the other cores are able to handle some of the other CPU tasks, such as running hardware controllers.

And the reason that it kind've oscillates between cores is because "Set Affinity" tells the process that it's allowed to use that core, not that it has to or even should. If you want something to use both cores, open up two processes, set the first to core 1 and the second to core 2. Most of the time that's unusable like that, but I recently transcoded my entire music library and set one process to do songs from A-M, and the other from N-Z. It really helped

Memory Bandwidth

[Brad1138]

It'll have 620 TB of memory and support 5 PB/s

Is that kind of memory bandwidth possible? You could access the entire 620TB in ~120 milliseconds. I guess nothing is ever to fast, it just seems unrealistically fast.