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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."
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.
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!
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.