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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."

11 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 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.

    5. 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.

  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 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.

      --
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  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.