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POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010

Posted by timothy on from the not-necessarily-early-2010 dept.

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."

56 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. so, if Apple... by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 3, Interesting

    had stayed with IBM, where would they be today?

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    1. Re:so, if Apple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They would still be an online music store.

    2. Re:so, if Apple... by cabjf · · Score: 4, Informative

      Given how important laptop sales are to Apple, they would still be facing a losing proposition where IBM just isn't focused on the type of processors needed for mobile applications.

    3. Re:so, if Apple... by AchilleTalon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nobody can really tell. Apple had some requirements at its time which imposed some design decisions which made the PowerPC not evolving the same path as the Power. Apple was targetting the workstations market, while the Power 7 is targetting the servers market. These are pretty different chips and it is far to be sure the PowerPC would have become a long term winner for the workstation and the best performance for the bucks chip.

      --
      Achille Talon
      Hop!
    4. Re:so, if Apple... by CannonballHead · · Score: 1

      Is there a digitized version of the recording? I don't have a tape player but I'd love to see POWER! ;)

    5. Re:so, if Apple... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Informative

      Probably nowhere exciting. The substantial majority of Apple's PC business is laptops and all-in-ones, both applications where low power use is more important than sheer punch. The POWER7 might have good performance per watt; but, unless a miracle has occurred between POWER6 and now, it would be absolutely useless for anything smaller than a workstation(or possibly a blade, where noise isn't an issue).

      It might have made the tiny minority of Mac Pro/Xserve buyers happy; but, unless Apple could have done a far better job than it ever had in interesting IBM in building custom chips for its needs, sticking with IBM would have made Apple's portables a complete joke.

    6. Re:so, if Apple... by oracleofbargth · · Score: 1, Informative

      Microsoft taped POWER with Xbox360 and they have the most powerful console on the market (sorry PS3 fanboys, this is true, ask developers not marketing).

      I think you need to study up on your processors a little more. From Wikipedia:

      The cores of the [X-Box 360's] Xenon processor were developed using a slightly-modified version of the PlayStation 3's Cell Processor PPE architecture

      Soooo, if they're both using basically the same CPU, the only difference comes out to what set of software you like better. (Or which set of dev tools the programmers like better.)

    7. Re:so, if Apple... by forkazoo · · Score: 1

      had stayed with IBM, where would they be today?

      Probably not in the workstation market. Possibly trying to figure out a way to credibly attack the server market by competing with their supplier of server CPU's in a very awkward way. And, presumably doing a bunch of interesting things in the embedded space beyond iPod / iPhone. I'm imagining all sorts of wacky embedded PPC chips being targeted toward in-car Apple branded entertainment systems, and set top boxes, etc. The "Macintosh" would basically be dead. IBM doesn't make a chip that is suitable for a high end desktop system. None of what was announced today it suitable for the desktop market.

    8. Re:so, if Apple... by salimma · · Score: 2, Informative

      Doesn't matter either way to IBM, since they designed the Cell CPU as well, and it's also POWER-based.

      Cell is potentially much more powerful, it's just harder to program (trust Sony to pick such designs, recall the PS2's Emotion Engine?)

      --
      Michel
      Fedora Project Contribut
    9. Re:so, if Apple... by DurendalMac · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's pure bullshit. Someone needs to cut that out. Both the 360 CPU and the Cell are PowerPC-based chips, but that's as far as the similarities go. The 360 has a lot more in common with the PowerPC 970 (aka G5) than it does the Cell. The Cell has a basic CPU and 8 additional specialized processing units. The 360 has a triple core PowerPC variant. Not even close.

    10. Re:so, if Apple... by WiiVault · · Score: 1

      When Apple made the switch they were in the exactly the situation you describe. The G5s were still quite competitive with multicores and such. But the Powerbook/iBooks were woefully underpowered with their single G4s.

    11. Re:so, if Apple... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      At least, at the time, the G4s were quite competitive in energy use terms. IIRC, P4s and Pentium Ms were both faster; but P4s had lousy battery life (and were largely responsible for the plague of two-inch thick dells that made horrible whining noises just to keep cool) while the Pentium Ms were both fast and cool, but were Intel's premium priced offering at the time. Assuming you didn't care too much about performance, a 12 inch ibook was, by a fair margin, the cheapest thin and light laptop you could get.

      Had things continued down that path, it would have gotten downright humiliating. Cheap C2Ds versus contemporary equivalents of the G4 would be simply cruel.

    12. Re:so, if Apple... by imgod2u · · Score: 3, Informative

      While true, the vast majority of the reason developers say the 360's PPC is "faster" is that it's easier to program. In terms of theoretical flops, the CELL inside the PS3 is far more capable.

      If you just strung together a bunch of code and hit "compile" on GCC, the 360 will be lightyears ahead. If you have 2-3 really good engineers writing sequences for the CELL, the vertex computational power will be far superior.

    13. Re:so, if Apple... by sanosuke001 · · Score: 2, Informative

      # Microsoft says the Xbox 360 can do 1 teraflops
      # Sony says the PS3 can do about 2 teraflops

      so, who has more power? for a real-world comparison (like you said, marketing teams suck) here's an article from tgdaily: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37621/128/

      developers never said the 360 has more power. they said it's easier to develop for.

      --
      -SaNo
    14. Re:so, if Apple... by anarkhos · · Score: 1

      Dead, Jim.

      Anyway, who says they can't make a server with these chips, or even release OS X for IBM hardware?

      --
      >80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
      >life
    15. Re:so, if Apple... by robthebloke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And that's really the problem with the cell. You need 2 or 3 good (additional) engineers to get the best out of it - and finding people good enough is not an easy task. The biggest problem however, given the current economic climate, is that most games companies are struggling to find the extra cash needed to pay their wages. Given the number of PS3's out there vs the number of Wii's and 360's in the wild, it's hard to justify that additional cost for the SKU with the least market share. The result is that the PS3 games aren't fully exploiting the hardware, and i suspect only a small handful ever will.

    16. Re:so, if Apple... by ToasterMonkey · · Score: 1

      Possibly trying to figure out a way to credibly attack the server market by competing with their supplier of server CPU's in a very awkward way.

      PowerPC based Apple servers did not compete with IBM's Power Systems in any way.

    17. Re:so, if Apple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Right, but that is because IBM had decided to g leave this market to PAsemi and its extremely power efficient chips (the 65 nm design needs more or less the same power as an Atom, but gives the performance of a Core Duo, not Core2 however). In its performance range, nothing still matches PAsemi's PA6T, despite the fact that it is one generation behind in process technology.

      Ok, Apple bought PAsemi, what will come out of it is anyone's guess (and I don't believe a world class processor design team is only working gluing together ARM cores and peripherals on the same die for iPods and iPhones) .

      About the G4, they were completely hampered by their FSB which was running at half the speed of the memory in the latest PPC based notebooks. A lower clocked MPC8610
      runs about 3 times faster at 1GHz than a 1.67GHz G4 (but has an integrated dual channel DDR2 memory controller).

      As somebody completely allergic to the x86 monoculture/monopoly, I'm going to buy an ARM netbook in the last quarter.

    18. Re:so, if Apple... by forkazoo · · Score: 1

      PowerPC based Apple servers did not compete with IBM's Power Systems in any way.

      Fair enough, but the question was where Apple would be now if they had stuck with IBM CPU's. Without a credible desktop CPU option, they'd have embedded and server CPU's, which means they'd probably be trying to figure out some use for big POWER chips. Possibly in some insane Mac Pro analogue, but much more likley that Apple would be trying to do something in the POWER Server market.

    19. Re:so, if Apple... by Z80a · · Score: 1

      you know most of this number comes from the fixed logic part of the gpus of the consoles, right?

    20. Re:so, if Apple... by otis+wildflower · · Score: 1

      Ah so?

      (yeah yeah, short lived system, but at least it had a funny advertisement IIRC...)

    21. Re:so, if Apple... by yabos · · Score: 1

      And the XBox gets so damn hot it can melt solder connections on the graphics card. Sounds great for the laptops.

    22. Re:so, if Apple... by sanosuke001 · · Score: 1

      It specifically states "CPU" in the graph and later in the article he said he removed the GPUs because there was some confusion on the exact output of the PS3's GPU.

      So, probably not.

      --
      -SaNo
    23. Re:so, if Apple... by cabjf · · Score: 1

      That still misses the laptop range though. So IBM has the server market and PASemi has the ultra-power efficient end of the mobile market. That still leaves a gaping whole where Apple puts their laptops. If they're still keeping the Mac OS X code base working on different platforms though (as they were before the Intel switch), it probably wouldn't be too hard to create devices above the iPhone but below the Macbook and Macbook Air based on Power chip designs from PASemi.

    24. Re:so, if Apple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It's not just that. Each one is good at different things.

      Massively parallel, but fairly simple tasks (like graphics) are dominated by the the PS3 (if you want to design an engine that renders EVERY snowflake in a snowstorm, the PS3 is going to destroy the 360.

      The 360, on the other hand, is good for modestly parallel, complex calculations.

      Modern games need both, and the complex computations can't always be split into small enough chunks that the PS3 will do them well.

      So, it's not that one is better than the other, but that both tend to do different things. If I want lots of eye candy (dead or alive beach volleyball 2 for example), I would want the game made on the PS3. If I wanted something with a lot of complex/smart AI and some more immersive gameplay, I would want the 360.

    25. Re:so, if Apple... by BOFHelsinki · · Score: 1

      The result is that the PS3 games aren't fully exploiting the hardware, and i suspect only a small handful ever will.

      That's what they said about the PS2 though... In the end, the learning curve translated into platform longevity, with next waves of games increasingly leveraging the hardware. Who really cares if the first games tap only a fraction of the potential?

      The difficulty gets exaggerated too. There is pretty good middleware available, also as FOSS. (See e.g. the CellPerformance forum at Beyond3D.com for pointers and discussion.) IBM has made a real effort with the developer support, unlike Sony was with PS2.

    26. Re:so, if Apple... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      And nobody ever bothered to learn to program a GPU either because specialized processors don't work and are to much trouble.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    27. Re:so, if Apple... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      It was always my impression that the Cell was designed to be used with more than one CPU per system and more cores than the PS3 has enabled per CPU. Instead of investing in a whole new CPU for next gen systems it seems they intended to be able to throw more CPUs in. Tweak up the processor speed a little and compete with a lot less invested. I remember them advertising that if other appliances were on the same network and had Cell processors that your PlayStation would be able to utilize that processing power.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    28. Re:so, if Apple... by imgod2u · · Score: 1

      Nobody ever learned to program a GPU because there is a very very nice standardized -- two of them actually -- API abstraction layer; DirectX and OpenGL. Common graphics functions that are coupled with hardware by the library.

      IMO, this is exactly what IBM/Sony should be doing with the Cell -- create a standard library as well as have a staff dedicated to consulting/developing low-level functions and farm those guys out to game developers.

  2. Who will ship the other half? by Null+Perception · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Who will ship the other half? by fbjon · · Score: 1

      I have faith that IBM will keep me safe until 11:59 AM July 2, 2010.

      --
      True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
  3. Price Cuts? by bdrees · · Score: 1

    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.

  4. Re:Look at Cell on PS3... by russotto · · Score: 3, Interesting

    POWER is an ordinary RISC architecture, not at all like the Cell. Programming for it isn't a problem.

  5. Re:Look at Cell on PS3... by oracleofbargth · · Score: 1

    The Cell is just a POWER4+ with some programmable vector processors tacked on.

  6. No competitive laptop offering! by FranTaylor · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by drspliff · · Score: 1

      What would stop them from building high-end scientific/medical/video/whatever Mac Pro workstations but using Power6 chips/boards straight from IBM?

      Sure it'd be pricey, but there's a niche for this kinda stuff; SGI & Sun workstations come to mind

    2. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by SethJohnson · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What would stop them from building high-end scientific/medical/video/whatever Mac Pro workstations but using Power6 chips/boards straight from IBM?

      Maintaining a branch of the OS complete with drivers for a separate chip architecture is non-trivial. Undoubtedly, someone in Apple marketing has a spreadsheet that compares development & maintenance costs of each chip available (ARM, CELL, Intel, Power) with anticipated product demand. Right now the numbers don't work out.

      Seth

      --
      $5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
    3. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by nurb432 · · Score: 1

      True, but they could have dominated the desktop and server market. And with universal binaries, they could have supported both architectures until the right power chip came along for more powerful laptops.

      I also think we would have seen the lower power chips eventually if they had stayed continued with the Power chip a little longer. Walking away from it destroyed any leverage they had, so we never saw what was possible..

      --
      ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    4. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by RyuuzakiTetsuya · · Score: 1

      OS and Software.

      Apple isn't even supporting Power with 10.6.

      Some other vendor's going to have to fill that role.

      --
      Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
    5. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by robthebloke · · Score: 1

      chicken and egg.

      Apple walking away from power probably had the effect of IBM re-assessing their market, making them divert resources from the mobile chips to the server and console products. Net result: the power7 looks pretty good...

    6. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by ZosX · · Score: 1

      Something tells me that Apple may see the writing on the wall and positioned themselves to eventually become a software vendor like Microsoft. It would certainly throw the world into a whirlwind if they started offering OS X for off the shelf commodity PC hardware. They may see their position as a hardware vendor as precarious and could have been planning for a potential plummet. If their software already ran on PCs it would be a very easy switch to just stop producing hardware and go software only. I don't think the move had anything to do with laptop chips, though that certainly was a sore point at the time and something that probably tipped the scales towards x86. PPC just wasn't where it needed to be and it wasn't going to get there in time to be competitive as well. I loved the PPC chips, and they were a big reason I liked the macs back in the day, but I don't really think the switch has hurt apple in many ways and they certainly have benefited from cheaper, faster hardware and have really put an end to a great deal of the mac/pc compatibility problems. We really need more OS competition on PCs. A Linux/Windows only world really doesn't cut it. (lets not get into the bsds or solaris, no desktop penetration atm....) Blah. Running behind. Ramble on.

      --
      zosxavius photography
    7. Re:No competitive laptop offering! by SteeldrivingJon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure it'd be pricey, but there's a niche for this kinda stuff; SGI & Sun workstations come to mind

      You might want to look into how SGI and Sun are doing these days. Especially SGI.

      --
      September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
  7. Do you know what this means? by Alzheimers · · Score: 1

    Here comes the DREAMCAST II

    1. Re:Do you know what this means? by robthebloke · · Score: 1

      otherwise known as the xbox 360....

    2. Re:Do you know what this means? by HonIsCool · · Score: 1

      What does the Dreamcast have to do with an IBM processor?

      --
      "Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
  8. Re:Look at Cell on PS3... by antifoidulus · · Score: 1

    A very similar chip is in the xbox 360, but like you said more people want to program for that machine but not the ps3. If the ps3 is hard to program a large part of the problem may very well be Sony's dev tools, not to mention simple economics. Most of the people that program games for consoles are doing it for an employer who wants to sell games and the 360 simply has a much larger install base than the ps3 does, and thus more people program for it....

    --
    Monstar L
  9. Is Jeremy Clarkson by skudenfaugen · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...working for IBM on the side? Each time I hear about IBM's POWER whatever, all I see is Clarkson shouting in a commercial.

    1. Re:Is Jeremy Clarkson by adolf · · Score: 1

      *boggle*

      Clarkson does commercials?

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  10. New powerbook? by nurb432 · · Score: 1

    Cool, can we get this in a powerbook.. oh wait, Apple abandoned the future...

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
    1. Re:New powerbook? by 4D6963 · · Score: 1

      That's no laptop CPU.

      --
      You just got troll'd!
  11. wiki by arnodf · · Score: 1

    if you believe Wikipedia

    Sure we do!

  12. Re:Look at Cell on PS3... by robthebloke · · Score: 1

    In all fairness it's not all to do with the cell, it's the more to do with the fecked up wacky ideas sony had in how that should integrate with the rest of the PS3. Not to mention the awful dev tools that shipped with it.

  13. Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    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.

  14. Obsession with 7 by shadowblaster · · Score: 1

    Is it just me or is the tech world currently obsessed with the number 7?

    Intel Core i7
    IBM Power7
    Windows7

    1. Re:Obsession with 7 by BOFHelsinki · · Score: 1

      In IBM's case it's logical, though.

  15. Re:Drop in replacement for P6 by MikeFM · · Score: 1

    Besides, when I asked the P7 chips were way expensive on top of a server that already costs 10's of thousands of dollars.

    --
    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.