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IBM Releases Power7 Processor

Posted by kdawson on from the of-cores dept.

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.

3 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Direct comparisons are bad by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Direct comparisons are bad by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 5, Informative

      POWER and Itanium are architecturally so different...

      That doesn't matter; they both address the same market (high-end Unix) and thus they are competitors.

      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.

      Yeah, POWER7 can only execute... six instructions per cycle. And you might indeed say that an in-order Itanium at 1.7 GHz doesn't come close to an out-of-order POWER7 at 3+ GHz.

      While its possible that POWER7 is faster, its also more expensive to get a reasonable configuration...

      Since no Tukwila servers have been announced, we don't even know how much they will cost.

  2. Ah, AIX by wandazulu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.