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POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010
BBCWatcher writes "In CPU news, IBM says that its POWER7 servers will start shipping in the first half of 2010, on schedule or perhaps even a few months early if you believe Wikipedia. Moreover, upgrades from a wide variety of POWER6 models will be mere CPU swaps, with the upgraded servers keeping their same serial numbers. (Bean counters like that.) POWER7 sports up to 8 cores per die, 4 threads per core, a clock speed a Hertz or two above 4 GHz, 45 nm process manufacturing, on-chip DDR3, and up to 1,000 micropartitions per machine. IBM claims that POWER7 will offer about 256 Gflops per die and two to three times the performance per watt as POWER6. IBM wants to keep taking orders now for its POWER6 gear (duh), so its sales reps are allegedly ready and eager to deal on 6-cum-7 packages. And it looks like that cunning plan could work rather well given Sun's Rock CPU cancellation and HP's delay of Tukwila Itanium to 2010. (Is anybody still in the server CPU race except IBM, Intel, and maybe AMD?) In 2006, POWER7 won the contest for a DARPA supercomputing R&D grant of $244 million, so you could say that each US citizen is in for about a dollar already."
Ah, so these are what will run the monoliths.
had stayed with IBM, where would they be today?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Was super fast, had a bunch of benefits, and at the end, nobody wants to program for it. Sure, people do it, but if you read folks like Carmack who prefer Xbox programming than PS3 simply because it's easier to program in, it makes you wonder about the utility of all this new architecture when the development tools aren't mature to support it.
That said, I'm far from a programmer so I can't make any assumptions about this -- but all I can say is I wonder how it will play out, either like Cell or like Intel. I have no idea.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Who will be shipping the second half of 2010? Furthermore, shouldn't we be afraid that terrorists might try and sabotage these shipments and hold time hostage, leaving us to teeter on the precipice at 11:59 December 31, 2009?!
Great new book on Evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins
IBM has not cut prices on its current Power6 and Power6+ servers, but if the upgrade guarantee doesn't grease the sales skids, that will be the next move.
They would not be in the laptop market, which has overtaken the desktop market. They did the right thing.
PowerPC has nothing that can compete with Core Duo on the laptop. Not even close.
Here comes the DREAMCAST II
Ever since Apple, IBM, and Motorola jumped into bed together twelve years ago, tech media and Apple watchdogs especially have had a field day with speculation, rumors, and actual news regarding new PowerPC projects. Apple gave a familiar face and a flair of iconoclast to the affair while IBM lent a grave sobriety. This thing could really happen, then, someone to challenge the Microsoft/Intel duopoly. And the stories just kept coming, well into the next decade. But not all of them were so real.
So what were these projects that came and went faster than a Quad Xeon Mac? Handily enough, they're right below, broken down by project. Read on to find out what Apple, IBM, and Motorola had in store for us throughout the Nineties and what didn't make the cut. Through all the rumors, one thing was certain: AIM never had a lack of imagination, even if it didn't always end up in silicon.
Too Much Too Soon
IBM and Motorola jointly announced the 64-bit PowerPC 620 at the October '94 Microprocessor Forum nine years earlier than the Power Mac G5 and its PowerPC 970 processor. Designed for servers, the 620 supported up to 128 MB L2 cache(!) and was set to scale from 133 to 150 MHz. It eventually shipped, albeit briefly, in systems from Groupe Bull. Structurally it was nearly identical with the PowerPC 604, save for some nips and tucks and wider registers and data paths. Think of a PowerPC 604 with twice the lung capacity.
The 620's similarity to the PowerPC 604 was also its undoing. At this point in time, the 604 was clocking up, and because it was a 32-bit chip, it ran cooler and cheaper than its 64-bit brother and actually out-performed it. The PowerPC 604 was also getting upgraded to the 604e, which further blew the pants off the 620. That, plus the fact that no one really needed a 64-bit workstation at that point in time resulted in one dead-end PowerPC core. The chip supposedly reached 200 MHz with an enhanced core (the PowerPC 620e?) before the guillotine fell.
Oops, looks like we didn't need 64-bit that badly yet.
He Goes Both Ways
Talk about ambitious. In '96 sources started to talk the PowerPC 615 that ran x86 instructions natively. How it did this wasn't exactly clear: At first the chip had to boot in either PowerPC or x86 mode, then it gained the ability to run the other ISA's instructions after a five clock-cycle flush, then it decoded the instructions on the fly, and finally it was supposed to have a separate unit or co-processor that made them magic happen. On top of that it plugged into existing OverDrive sockets but also created enormous amounts of heat.
Whew, huh?
That's what Microsoft said when talking to IBM about it. The chip would need Windows NT to succeed and MS didn't think it was a good idea. With nothing else really wanting to run on it because why would you run x86 software on a chip that didn't do x86 as fast or as cheap as Intel, and who's going to use the PowerPC ISA? IBM found itself without an audience on this one. Big Blue actually taped out some test units, but they're probably collecting dust or jingling against a set of keys now. This hybrid beast wowed its engineers and no one else.
The So-Called Speed Demon
Exponential, Inc. took the PowerPC 604 design and stripped it bare in order to blast its clock speed into the stratosphere. Using BiCMOS technology that allowed for faster gate switching, the PowerPC X was slated to run at speeds of 533 MHz in late 1996 when AIM and Intel were toying with 200 MHz. Of course, Mac users ate it up: PowerPC was at least holding even with Intel's offerings and they were eager for more good news. Apple had even invested in the company, and
And then everyone woke up. The Mach V and PowerPC G3 were already hitting the marks claimed by Exponential, who had in the meantime only delivered a 410 MHz part that didn't so much run as it did that thing where you cross the street in front of a car and try to act l
Cool, can we get this in a powerbook.. oh wait, Apple abandoned the future...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Sure we do!
Not if you count having to plumb water into the beasts, I wonder where you put the tea-bag?
Nice try, but you're wrong. The PPU of the cell is a dual-issue, in-order chip design that was developed specifically for Cell by IBM. POWER4+ is aggressively out-of-order.
Its kind of like comparing an original Pentium with a Pentium II. The name may be similar, but the internal architectures are entirely different--Pentium had dual in-order pipelines and PPro/P2/P3 were the out-of-order predecessors of the Core and Core2 architecture.
Since IBM, Toshiba and Sony all jointly have rights to use the Cell stuff in other projects, IBM took the same in-order chip design that was used in the Cell PPU and added some extra features to it, and licensed it to Microsoft as the three Xenon CPUs that run the Xbox360. So ironically enough, the PPU of the Cell and the CPU of the Xbox360 are very similar to optimize for.
Is it just me or is the tech world currently obsessed with the number 7?
Intel Core i7
IBM Power7
Windows7