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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.
First, there is no 3GHz ceiling, so you're begging the question. Second, these processors use specialized cooling - not run of the mill cheapo barely-enough heatsinks. If AMD or Intel spent $20 more on their heatsinks, they'd easily be selling 3.4-3.8GHz processors. But the profit margin isn't there. Third, power usage hikes as you increase voltage high enough to hit those speeds. Most people running nuclear explosion simulations on a 4GHz processor don't care, people running 30,000 machines in a design center...do care.
There's no contradiction. Power usage is less of an issue on higher end "enthusiast" chips. They could easily sell 3.6GHz chips in this space with better heatsinks (as evidenced by...people running them at 4GHz easily on air cooling).
In the commodity space, even with better cooling, the power usage increases disproportionately as voltage goes up. There is a sweet spot, and it isn't currently >3GHz.
Finally, I didn't point out why there is no 3GHz ceiling because it takes 30 seconds of googling to see that there are currently chips selling at > 3GHz, and there have in the past been x86 CPUs up to 3.73GHz.
Busted my ass.
IBM gear gets you LPARs, with a real hypervisor that is laps ahead of all the other stuff.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The reason why AMD and Intel don't push the high end chips is frankly there just isn't much of a market for them ATM. Since most of the games being released are for console first and PC second, they simply aren't being bottle-necked by the CPU. This is also why AMD and Nvidia are having to push multiscreen and GPGPU, because frankly a less than $100 card will play a good 80%+ of the games out there.
Second for the jobs the average Joes are doing, web surfing, music/video, maybe the occasional video conversion, even the lower end chips are well past "good enough" for them. I have been selling a lot of low end AMD dual and triple core machines lately, and all I hear from my customers is "how fast" they are, and how they never seem to slow down. With hardware acceleration on the motherboard these 2.4GHz-2.8GHz duals and triples are frankly overkill, with most of the time the CPU twiddling its thumbs. I myself bought a 925 quad when they got so cheap, but a good 90% of the time the chip is barely above idle.
So it isn't that AMD and Intel can't make them, because we have seen in the past they can, it is just there really isn't much of a market for them. To get faster than 3.2GHz you really start cranking up the heat and the power, and that equals higher electric bills most folks don't want, not to mention having fans that sound like a F15 taking off isn't very pleasant. With the new 95w like my 925 the chips rarely get above 83f idle and so far mine has maxed at 109f doing video transcoding. And the 65w duals are so quiet I have to watch when setting them up I don't turn them off when I mean to turn them on, because i simply don't hear any noise. Folks nowadays seem to care much more about that than the MHz race anymore.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.