Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

17 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 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.

    5. 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
    6. 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.

    7. 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.

    8. 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
    9. 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.

    10. 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.

  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
  3. 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.

  4. 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 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!
    2. 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
  5. 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.