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IBM Releases Power7 Processor
Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, but are four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.
POWER and Itanium are architecturally so different that kdawson's snide "put this new Intel chip in the shade" comment is kind of nonsensical. Itanium is superscalar to an extent that POWER doesn't come close to, with each core being able to execute up to six instructions per cycle. While its possible that POWER7 is faster, its also more expensive to get a reasonable configuration and the performance difference between the two is not as clear-cut as our illustrious editor is trying to suggest.
You mean how you can buy a 3.4 GHz Phenom II X4 from AMD? That 3.0 GHz ceiling?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Its still that way. POWER6 could actually go up to 5GHz, but IBM sacrificed out-of-order execution to get there. POWER7 brings it back with a slightly lower clock speed and more cores.
Actually both AMD and Intel have chips currently clocked over 3 GHz. Some of the newer Intel chips also have something they call Turbo Boost where the chip essentially overclocks itself if it's not using all of its cores. It also looks like AMD has a 3.6 GHz Phenom II X4 chip slated to be released soon. It would appear that the companies found solutions to whatever ceilings may have existed. VIA doesn't target the high-end of the market so I don't think that they're producing any chips that would run at those clock speeds.
AIX....the last Unix you can't just "get" a copy of, but need to actually buy the hardware (a la the Mac).
Don't forget HPUX.
Don't forget that one of those 4GHz CPUs probably costs over 10 times as much as an equivalent Intel or AMD part. A decent PC costs as much as a car payment -- a decent POWER machine costs as much as a car.
The price is old, but a couple years ago a 5GHz Power6 CPU cost $15k for a dual-core module (with 4 threads) plus $30k to activate each core. That means you'd pay $75k total to use both cores of the CPU module. I'm sure Intel would have no problem supplying 5GHz CPUs at $75k each, but it's unlikely that they'd have many takers, so you're stuck with CPUs that are only 3GHz (but go almost as fast as IBM's 5GHz parts).
dom
And Mac OS X.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
On a $/FLOP basis they get slaughtered by Nehalem-EX, but if you need flat out performance the Power7 system will be superior thanks to 2x more memory bandwidth per core and ~3.5x more interprocessor bandwidth. The basics for this type of comparison are Specfp_base, Specint_base for CPU performance and usually either SAP, TPC-C or specjbb for business logic comparisons.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually, I just checked said NDA, as it has been at least five years since I worked for them, and my NDA is over, so....
Support has NEVER been fully dropped and never will unless IBM becomes non-viable in the marketplace. On top of that, long-term contracts Apple has with some companies pretty much ensures that they keep some minimal amount of POWER support active, at least into the next decade.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your bullshit reality bubble? Get a real job in the industry and maybe you'd have half a clue.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'd also add that depending on the task, the cheap solution would be slower if the task had serial parts that could not be separated into threads. For instance if a task takes 1,000 cycles and all of the instructions must be done in a precise order, a quad-core processor running at 2.0 GHz would be slower and be of lower utility than a single core 4.0 GHz processor, assuming all other things are equal. The quad-core ends up working at half the speed of the single core and the quad-core also has the penalty of three idle cores draining electricity.
I would also imagine that these newer POWER7 processors carry over the decimal floating point units present in the POWER6. Yes, floating point units that operate in base-10 as opposed to base-2. Not necessarily of much value for scientific purposes, but great for preserving accuracy in financial calculations. One gets to avoid the base-10 to base-2 conversion and the conversion back that can severely hurt accuracy with only a binary floating point unit. One also gets a nice speed up by doing decimal math in hardware as opposed to the other option of software decimal math.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
You'd buy a Power7 because it comes with 63 other Power7 friends in a single box and runs an operating system specifically designed for the ridiculous number of cores and capable of handling even the most data intensive legacy applications.
I agree that the high end server market is becoming smaller and smaller as time goes on but in reality there's still a huge backbone of legacy applications that require the sort of processing throughput only a single whopping great server can provide. The kind of applications that draw $150,000 3 month contracts for developers because nobody knows a damn thing about them, general public included.
You buy it for the hypervisor, massive IO, and capacity upgrade on demand. Forget what you know about virtualization from xen and VMWare. The POWER hypervisor lets you add (or remove) ram, buses, and processors from a running server. You can even set the memory and cpu to pull from a shared pool (with set priorities and limits). The internal 10Gb network doesn't hurt either.
Try scaling your xen system when you are IO bound to disk. POWER offers physical and (fast) virtual IO, giving each partition "big iron" IO capacity.
POWER is made by people who understand scaling. Commodity boxes are made for people who like big numbers printed on the side of the box and don't understand why high CPU and memory numbers are useless if your disk array can't keep up.