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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.
AIX....the last Unix you can't just "get" a copy of, but need to actually buy the hardware (a la the Mac). We had a Power box at work with AIX for awhile, but its configuration tools was quite ... unique among Unix flavors (though I was told it was pretty straightforward IBM) and I had a horrible time getting GCC to work with it; most every F/OSS package I came across either straight up wasn't tested on AIX (because no one had the hardware), or it had a whole separate setup (I believe one of the standard lines running ./configure is "Is this an AIX system?").
I recall the box being wicked fast when we were running Oracle on it; it was a "small" Power machine but it still could handle a monster database with hundreds of millions of rows with no trouble. Frankly, I was sort-of sad to see it go; I really did want to get more familiar with it, but apparently the maintenance costs IBM was charging made it a non-starter. Plus, ultimately, it seems that it just wasn't very OSS friendly; xlc is apparently an amazing compiler for the PowerPC, but they wanted $6000 for a license per developer. Plus, and I'm sorry if this is nitpicking, but to have the C compiler called xlc and the C++ compiler called xlC was just, well, insane.
What I really wanted to do was get Linux on it, and Oracle even has a Linux-on-Power version of their database, but there seemed to be some grumbling from the IBM salespeople (according to my boss) that they discourage people from running Linux on Power....I guess you (according to them) need AIX to unleash the real "power" in the PowerPC.
Sigh, okay, whatever. back to Linux on x86-64.
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.
LOL You're in no position to know.
I am, however. But my NDA forbids me from saying anything.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Holy shit, this guy is on to something. You could write these common computing tasks as a sort of "bench" suite of tests. Then on each architecture, you would get different "marks" against the "bench". Let's call them "benchmarks" for brevity. These "benchmarks" would give allow clear and unambiguous comparison of these various chips. Foolproof and brilliant!
XML causes global warming.
There probably were better ways of increasing computational speed using multicore processor designs than just increasing the clock speed. Kind of like going from a V4 engine to V6 being a better option in terms of power than increasing the individual piston HP of the V4 from 25 to 30.
Back in my day, manufacturers used to slap a turbo button on the front of the case.
And we liked it that way.
Now get off my lawn!
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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.
You learn something new every day.
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.