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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?"
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In other news, temperatures on the University of Illinois campus have mysteriously risen ten degrees. Scientists are still examining possible causes..
"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."
I came.
Yes, but I think you'll still have to disable the aero if you want to get DNF to work right.
Caveat Utilitor
When can I get an iphone with it ?
G
I'd be a lot more excited about these PPC lines if Ubuntu 8.04 would install and run properly on the PS3, whose PPC+6xDSP architecture would be a great entry level platform for coming up with parallel techniques for the bigger and more parallel PPC chips.
--
make install -not war
Seriously:
I have a couple dual-core PCs. I notice that some won't ever use 100% CPU even though they easily could. I check "set affinity" in task manager, which says the process should use both cores...but it only ever hits 50% of total CPU. Looking at the CPU graph, it shows that as usage goes up on one core, usage goes down on the other.
Is there any way to force a process to run over 2 cores at 100%?
If not...how would 300,000 cores help unless you are running 300,000 processes, or an app that you know will scale over that many cores?
The preceding was in fact a serious question.
The processor is gonna make humans obsolete. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
Face your daemons!
Yeah, right, it has optical connections. they will have to be disabled to play videos, otherwise you might copy them!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
... beowulf cluster of these 300,000 core machines? I want to be able to play high-definition video without any lag on Windows 7.
WTF? By that date, using the planned arch, it will be obsolete if not already scrapped before then.
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to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
Chances are IBM will still have a problem supplying them, plus new game consoles will get a priority in shipping in 2010, when that XBox 720 or Playstation 4 comes out.
It is also possible that the eight core chip will be really expensive, and in order to keep up with it a PowerMac would cost $4000 or more just to eliminate bottlenecks and use optical technology like super computers use to be able to use the chip properly. Not to say that nothing stops Apple from bringing out PowerPC based Macs in 2010 as Mac OSX already runs on PowerPC code and would have to be modified to run on the Power7 instruction set. Which is very doable. Apple could have Intel Macs for low cost systems for home and small businesses, and Power7 Macs for high end workstations and servers for middle to large businesses. I don't see why Apple couldn't bring back PowerMacs and sell them next to Intel Macs, unless IBM starts to have production problems again and can't supply Apple the number of PowerPC chips that they need?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
So you can get 16 cores in a low end box but it still won't have enough I/O slots so you will have to buy a shelf at $obscene_amount, seriously why does IBM put such few I/O slots in the lower end P series boxes?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So still no G5 laptop???? AHHHHHH!!!!!!
"daisy, daisy ....." or "stop that dave ...."
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
"My god, it's full of cores!"
It should be noted that previous POWER architectures had 2 threads per core. They also had SMT ( Simultaneous Multi-Threading ) support, which gave them an "effective" 4 threads per core. I wonder. Are the all the threads on the POWER7 "true" threads ( ie. 4 execution units -- 1 per thread ) or is it a 2 thread setup with SMT? On the other hand, if the POWER7 really does have 4 "true" threads, then with SMT you'd get an "effective" *8* threads per core.
jdb2
I'd guess that general PC market = low-margins, not to mention that this new processor will probably require a 5KW power supply.
No, what this means is that his applications really aren't burdening the CPU. If you build an MT Windows App that genuinely scales, then, it will most certainly give all the CPUs up. What's happening in his case, most likely, is that he's i/o bound and his cpus are doing nothing. OR, his applications aren't even multithreaded. Or both. I've written some MT C++ apps for Windows for crunching insurance prices and yep, they'll peg all the CPU that you can give it. Also, I wouldn't recommend even setting the task affinity in TM.
This is my sig.
I've actually been wondering if it would be possible to put the PS3's Cell processor into a laptop. I would pay reasonable money for that.
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*whooosh*
DNF = Duke Nukem Forever
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Look at the heatsink in a PS3 and you have your answer.
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.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Putting a server processor in PCs was tried; it was called the G5. It turned out OK, although having no laptop version was annoying.
I'm still a bit disappointed they didn't go with AMD. Seriously, Intel seems to "normal" at least AMD would be cheaper, at the time performed better, has an awesome mobile chip, and was doing 64 bit better before Intel. Though I'm not a big ATI fan, considering AMD and ATI have merged, and AMD is really trying to do the right thing with ATI I can see loads of benefit for Apple in the AMD camp.
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Yes, thank you, I'm well aware. DNF on Vista is an old joke about how Duke Nukem is taking so long, it will require Vista. Now that Vista is out and there have been games that require it, the joke is outdated. So go whoosh yourself.
A geek's wet dream if there ever was one.
Toshiba actually announced such a beast (albeit with less SPEs, wich might be a way to use slightly defective cell chips to increase the yields).
The only problem is that if this is only used in one machine, noone is going to bother writing applications for it.
You've got a guy on Blogspot going up against the large number of researchers at Intel who actually designed the chips, as well as researchers who can design and assemble supercomputers and are doing so with the belief that these chips are suitable. I wonder who wins.
Actually, it was the other way around.
Intel chips outperform the PowerPC cpus without a doubt. PowerPC cpus were horrible. The first MacBook pros with Intel chips were 2-3 times faster than the ones before with PowerPC chips. If anything, it was a good move for Apple to start using Intel. I'm not a huge Mac Fan. I own one Apple product, a Nano with RockBox currently on it. However, I do hate when people don't do their fact checking and simply want to troll about a company they hate without justification.
...IBM also announced a performance upgrade kit for the Power7 to enable it to meet the minimum HW requirements for Vista.
You've got a guy on Blogspot going up against the large number of researchers at Intel who actually designed the chips, as well as researchers who can design and assemble supercomputers and are doing so with the belief that these chips are suitable.
Not true. IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft and the others do not believe that they have the answer. In fact, judging by the amount of money (hundreds of millions) that they are currently spending in research labs around the world trying to find a solution, it's obvious that the industry is in a state of panic.
I wonder who wins.
It's not over until it's over.
But it turns out it will only actually run the home edition smoothly.
I remember something from that time that suggested it was simply a supply issue - AMD weren't big enough to guarantee supply. I remember looking at the figures and being surprised (about the capacity of AMD).
I also remember Jobs saying Intel had shown him _very_ exciting things, hint hint. And they were too.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Surely no one would ever need more...
Intel like make apple a unfair deal to get there chips in to apple systems.
The AMD lawsuit came out at just about the same time as the Intel apple deal.
Intel was not that good at the time and some of there chips that got used in macs where not even 64BIT at the time.
Intel chip sets sucked next the one for the amd chips. The Power Mac g5 had more pci-e lanes with a better setup then Intel had.
AMD had dual cpu boards with a better cpu to chipset link with more pci-e lanes and sli as well DDR1 ECC / DDR2 ECC not FB-DIMM like intels board.
With AMD you can uses any NB/SB setup unlike the dual cpu intel boards.
AMD MB with ATI and NVIDIA chipsets had much better on board video then intel had that the mac mini g4 said was bad next to it and there where Intel MB with NVIDIA and ATI on board video at the time as well.
The intel chipsets at the time also had a 3gb ram limit that is still there even with a 64bit cpu.
The mini still uses the same on board video chip.
That University of Illinois machine sounds like it needs more memory.
Only 620TB? Why not bump it up to 640? That should be enough for anybody.
The opinions expressed here are those of this individual, and may not reflect the policy or practice of the collective
I know companies trying to improve their products when they can just sell the old ones is rare, but it does happen, and that's what these companies are doing.
Nope. They are scared to death because programmers are having a hell of a hard time writing multithreaded software that uses more than just a few threads at a time. It's not easy to keep all the cores busy and balanced. If the industry can't find a solution soon, then nobody is going to buy those 16, 32, and thousand-core devices that are coming down the pike. Nobody wants to se a bunch pretty little cores piling up at the fab, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
My margarine tells me that I can't believe it's not butter... but I can.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
It's worse than that. He's the guy on blogspot. I imagine he also has a perpetual motion machine to sell.
To the grandparent: if you want people to start taking your ideas seriously, I recommend you stop talking about them like you're crackpot.
I won't be fast enough for Windows 7.
Using x86 processors more or less like controlers?
Thats what happens when you have to bring a new product to the market place a number of times over the course of a financial period. If they were to cut R&D right now they'd shadow of their former self long before those stock options matured.
Yes, it will. And let me, for the first time in my life, say "Duh!".
History is absolutely full of people who don't follow the mainstream theory or have financial backing and end up creating the next mainstream theory which receives all of the financial backing.
History is also full of people such yourself, AC, who poor scorn on non-conformist ways of looking at things and end up looking like fools.
Maybe he has a point, maybe he hasn't, but whether or not he is in the mainstream has little or no bearing on the validity of his thought.
I don't therefore I'm not.
By the time DNF ships, IBM will have this amount of processing power in your wristwatch.
Care to back any of this up with any kind of links or anything? Is this all coming out of your ass or can you show us anything to back up this idea that IBM dumped Apple? Year after year IBM's Gx processors were much much slower than their x86 competitors, so it'd appear you have things backwards.
Plus a Cell processor would be hopeless in Mac. The PPC core was relatively underpowered - most of the horsepower was in the SPEs and OS X would only have used those in very special circumstance with a lot of work.
E.g. you could imagine Photoshop using them for filters but given how slow Adobe has been at moving to X86 which is very similar to PPC, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a Photoshop which was tuned for a very different architecture like Cell.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The reason people troll is that Apple fanboys were telling us PPC was much faster than Intel right up to the switch, at which point they started telling us they were much slower.
It's like Big Brother fanboys telling you that they have always been at war with Eurasia one day and the very next day that Eurasia has always been their ally. This sort of thing invites trolling and/or rocket bombs.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Is there any way to force a process to run over 2 cores at 100%?
Sure there is. Just install Oracle Database Server on it and hit it with some poorly-written queries over an ODBC connection.
I thought 1 core == 1 thread of execution?
Or are they talking about some kind of extra hardware support for multitasking?
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And the libraries are where they'll be working this one out. They can't really expect the average programmer to handle this any more than they can count on him to implement a hashing algorithm.
Maybe we'll get Yet Another Fine Programming Language out of it -- though several of them were designed for this from their conception.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Maybe he has a point, maybe he hasn't, but whether or not he is in the mainstream has little or no bearing on the validity of his thought.
Well said. I want to point out that I am not the only one who's been saying that multithreading sucks. Donald Knuth has been saying the same thing. So have a whole bunch of other people. What I am adding to the fray is that there is an easy way to do parallel programming without threads that guarantees deterministic parallelism and easy programming. I am not asking for anybody to give me money. I just want to see the industry do the right thing.
Maybe not scared to death but concerned. Mostly, of course, for financial reasons but there also are some very bright people who would like to make computing more efficient.
Now - multiple processors / cores is nothing new, I hit those in 70's and loved them. Unfortunately the education and training didn't follow - more geared to basics, algorithms, structures, languages, etc than what, how and why? And it is even worse today - a product specialization and certificates are what pays - not performance, architecture, design, security, whatever!
Almost any computer problem can be broken to parallel solutions and execution - when was the last time that was in job requirements, you know those things which make you employed?
Heh, that's understandable. I must have missed that argument a few years ago. I typically try to avoid reading/listening to anything written by someone that zealous to a particular brand. It sort of borders on being its own religion. I'd dump any brand in a heartbeat if a better product were issued by someone else. Always seemed somewhat odd to me to stand by a product when it's inferior. If AMD happens to be better than Intel at the time I need a CPU, im buying AMD, and if Intel is better, then there's no reason I'd buy AMD, same with Nvidia/ATI and whatever else. I'd say fanboyism is similar to rooting for your last place team in sports, but you dont necessarly have to pay to watch a team.
Can I get a pair of those in a laptop? I'll pick up a pair of Nomex shorts a the local Nascar outlet store!
Nah. If something gets warmer it is caused by Global Warming and the solution is to eliminate Western industrial civilization.
If something gets colder it is Global Climate Change and the solution is to eliminate Western industrial civilization.
Not a contradiction, even though it seems like one.
Study the bifurcation diagram. As you drive the system harder by turning up R (which may be analogous to global warming - i.e. more available heat energy might be described this way) notice how the system follows R, then suddenly begins oscillating between two extremes. Keep on driving R harder and it breaks into chaos.
The weather IMHO has a lot in common with the logistic map equation. It's present behavior is dependent on it's past state, it's swings are driven by the energy input to the system, etc.
I know it's a gross oversimplification, but so is a mass falling through a uniform gravitational field with no wind resistance and so on. It's still useful to think about.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
True. The entire purpose of new versions of Windows is to make people buy new computers.
The PowerPC cpu's were not horrible. I've seen benchmarks over the years showing them outperforming intel cpu's (of the same generation) for some tasks (not all, some). The new architecture for Intel is definately impressive and Apple absolutely made the correct choice.
IBM continues to be the king of the hill at server processors like POWER5,6 and probably 7, but these are targeted at a different market than Apple's customers, and are not the same as the PowerPC cpu's.
Desktop PPC chips were great. The performance of a G5 desktop tower was pretty impressive for the day. They just sucked for laptops. Or anything else that you didn't want to use as a space heater. The huge difference wasn't in the desktop space -- a high end G5 wasn't much different in performance from the high end intel chips. In fact, they didn't replace the high end G5's for quite a while after they started the switch; they were the last in the line to go (along with the X-serves). But the difference between a G4 powerbook and their intel replacements was huge, because the G4's were effectively antiques.
There's two relevant questions:
1) What IBM could accomplish
2) What Apple was willing to pay for
The answer to the IBM/Apple breakup question is somewhere between those two.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Clearly we have a long way to go before we have a planet sized computer. However, I know a website where we can find plenty of robots to complain about it.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
This CPU appears to own Intel and AMD's. Can it be used in desktop PC's?
What you quote doesn't really backup your story. Saying Apple dumped IBM implies IBM was hurt. In reality, it was probably to IBM's advantage; they were happy to service Apple for as long as Apple was happy to buy from them, but had no particular desire to focus their attention on desktop- and laptop-class chips. IBM was happy to talk about delivering icy cold 3 GHz laptop chips, but that doesn't mean they had any particular desire to put as much money into it as they needed to to get anywhere. So Apple did leave IBM, but they didn't dump them — they just went to someone whose main focus actually is producing icy cold laptop chips. Apple leaving IBM was probably in everyone's best interest, including IBM.
Look out!
And APL always did. There are many others. Now that the architecture of the processor is moving back to the '80s, only with multiple cores, we need a technology archaeologist to dig back through back issues of the Communications of the ACM from the 70's and 60's and show us where we went astray.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
barely
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Right. That's the entire reason. Not to offer new features or anything.
Funny is people actually thought IBM can't deliver 3 Ghz or cold running G5. No, they just chose not to deliver it to Apple. Their focus is enterprise, servers, massive scientific computing. The early warning came when they sold their superbly prestigious and brand advertising Laptop division to Lenovo.
Just imagine they cancel this CPU to deliver 3 Ghz G5 to Apple. For what? Apple fans turned x86 fanatics almost overnight happily buying parallels to run Windows applications on OS X and buying overpriced Windows games which are masked as OS X applications.
At least IBM and Apple took away the "endian" excuse in hands of developers and GPU vendors. They still, shamelessly sell 20-30% more expensive graphics cards to Mac users, running Intel, on standard PCI-X mainboard! New excuse is... EFI!
There is kind of a sense that MS have seen the fact and shaving off features (!) on Windows 7. Well, if they don't after Vista disaster which even their friends like Intel refuses to upgrade, there won't be Microsoft in 5 years. Serious.
A much better PPC for a laptop would be the PWRficient. How does 2 GHz at 7 W per core sound? I wonder if such a laptop ever takes off though, now that Apple has bought the chop company.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Toshiba does it. Cell is a secondary processor.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=laptops&articleId=9102518&taxonomyId=66&intsrc=kc_top
I use photoshop. Maxing out it's memory on XP is a trivial matter, especially if I have Firefox, Thunderbird, xemacs, and a few bash sessions running at the same time. This may be the one thing that pushes me to get a big expensive Mac unless I find out that XP64 has stabilized to the point that I can convert over without any problems.
-X
A much better PPC for a laptop would be the PWRficient. How does 2 GHz at 7 W per core sound?
Much worse than Atom?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Where's that NUMA NUMA kid when you need him?
New Jersey.
I weep for Slashdot, that mods do not get a NUMA joke from 2004.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
If shaved windows is anything like shaved pussy, it'll be a good thing.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
2 of these.
toshiba has a prototype laptop with a normal intel CPU and one extra "lite" cell processor http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49295004,00.htm
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
Well, take a look at this:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2685&p=11
G5s were faster in several tasks when the 1st intel macs arrived
how long until
The interesting thing about this (and any other supercomputer like it) is how much time must be spent checkpointing. In order to maintain consistent state across the entire machine, up to 40% of its computational power must actually be spent checkpointing (not to mention the memory overhead associated with transferring state to stable storage). I'd imagine that the scientists who will use the new supercomputer will be slightly dismayed that they'll frequently have access only to about 60% of the processing power.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
No, it isn't Vista Capable, Moron. Vista runs on x86/x86_64 architecture when this machine is PowerPC architecture...
AMD still had the better 2 cpu + systems and they used cheaper ram. Amd also was open to useing any chip set as well.
Nifty, if Toshiba hurries they may be able to outdo the next iProduct.
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I tend to remember a "system on a chip" experiment from the late 90's. One of my clients got one with a Compaq label. Crap. Complete and utter crap.
That doesn't mean I've dismissed PWRficient, and I am intrigued by it, even though Atom does exist. It's worth watching.
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There's at least one other reason.
If Microsoft stopped releasing new _slightly_ incompatible versions of windows for long enough, someone will likely catch up and make a Windows compatible O/S.
Then Microsoft to Microsoft Windows will be like IBM to IBM PC BIOS.
For example: if people really stuck to Windows XP + DX9 for say the next 5 years, in that time WINE will come up with very good XP and DX9 compatibility, then someone could presumably package it nicely enough to release as a "drop in" replacement for Windows - different theme etc, but works like Windows XP.
If that happens Microsoft would lose significant control, just like Intel has lost significant control over where x86 is heading - they tried to EOL x86 and push the market onto the Itanic, but AMD produced AMD64 and so Intel had to do something like AMD64 (EMT64).
WINE is already pretty darn close. Probably too close for Microsoft's comfort. Microsoft might sue for patent infringement etc, but it is not certain they'll win, or win in all countries.
I never post as an AC. Why would I need to? Profane Muthafucka isn't exactly on my driver's license...
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
They're talking about hyperthreading, like the Pentium 4. If one thread is waiting on a cache miss another thread that already has everything in cache will get to run.
Just give me your CC # and something can be arranged...
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
Much like Intel phased out the Pentium series, but the Centrino and Dual Core series still use Pentium instruction sets but are no longer called Pentium.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Or the first machine that can run FlightSimX at 60 FPS
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
OK, thanks for the reply.
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It is not Vista Capable Hardware, you moron! It is PowerPC architecture whilst Vista is only built for Intel x86 and x86_64 architecture! So it IS neither VISTA CAPABLE HARDWARE nor even XP CAPABLE HARDWARE