IBM likes its servers and supercomputers.
A lot. After giving the
Power6 plenty of
self-congratulatory publicity, Big Blue is ready to move on to the 7th generation of
Power, which is set to be announced at the Hot Chips conference this evening. With eight cores and up to four
SMT4 threads running on each, the 45nm Power7 can perform 32 simultaneous tasks per chip. The designers have slapped in a whopping 32MB of eDRAM in each chip for improved latency, dual DDR3 memory controllers for a sustained 100GB per second bandwidth, and even error correcting code and memory mirroring for redundancy. Sounds like a major boon for research into the
brains of mice and the
history of dirty words, but we don't expect to hear much about this proc outside the server farm.
posted Aug 26th 2009 10:45AM
i'll have one
.... in an Xbox 720!
I'm rather partial to the X3!
To think that Apple could have probably had this chip if they had stuck with PPC.
Sounds like it might be able to handle Crysis.
yes but will it blend?
Sup dawg i heard you didn't like retiring dated memes
so i put some badger in your badger
so you can mushroom while you snake
Hot Chips is no joke.
Looks like an evacuation route for an office building!
The escape route is through the four Core.
I don't knowwwww...I hope there are exit doors to that building!
intel and amd got nothing against this beast
Wrong. They only need to know password to Windows.
But can it run Snow Leopard??
Introducing,
The All New PowerMac G7.
apple broke IBMs heart, he will never take her (or is it the other way around) back.
If apple can figure out how to add it back and microsoft can add power pc support to windows apple might consider it. This thing will be Really expensive though so I wouldn't count on it
@Grammar Delinquent
I think it was the other way round. Firstly by not delivering chips at 3gHz as originally promised and secondly IBM's complete inability to offer low power consumption chips for the portables.
@Grammar Delinquent
I think it was more IBM saw where the market was and it was not making special chips for Apple. OK they might have lost some sales but instead they worked on the CELL which they got into all the major consoles which is a market soo much bigger than Apple would have give its better to spend the effort there.
"I think it was the other way round. Firstly by not delivering chips at 3gHz as originally promised and secondly IBM's complete inability to offer low power consumption chips for the portables."
The accurate version of the story from the inside is that Apple was a relatively small customer for the part compared to overall volume yet was among the most demanding and vocal for modifying the chip for their specific needs. Shifting resources to rearchitect the chip for this lopsided situation just wasn't worth it (although the group responsible for interfacing with Apple did try hard to influence the larger Microelectronics division as a whole on this). When Apple dropped its use of the part, it was actually a welcome relief to IBM, which was not benefitting from the arrangement.
thats acutally really intresting....
PS3 sold about 24.6Million in 4 years...
4 years of Mac PPC is about 16Million (average of 4million units sold per year...might be even less)
Macs now sell much more then that, so maybe its a win/win for both.
@ grammer
Don't forget to add in 360 sales, the processor was developed while developing the cell (its an interesting read) and the wii chip to your sales numbers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jan/01/sony-xbox-ibm
PS3, Xbox 360, and Wi all use chips developed in the power chip dev group.
Wu-Tang!
Ice-T
I'll take a renderfarm of those
them chips probably run hotter than the surface of the sun.
AMD, as many of you don't know, uses Intel's architecture. The agreement is that AMD doesn't muscle into certain sectors of intel's chips business. Do your research.
And if intel wanted, but they won't considering how big AMD is, they could strip their incense from them.
ermmm..sorry but this is about IBM, not AMD. nice try though!
Actually, Intel can't strip AMD of their license. They have a cross-licensing agreement contract that if Intel wants to play hardball, so can AMD. Actually, Intel TRIED to do that about a year or two ago, and AMD said 'go ahead, try me' and Intel backed down. AMD has the patents for the memory controller in the CPU, and for 64bit x86 instructions, as well as a bunch of SIMD instruction set extensions that Intel uses.
The 64 bit architecture was developed by AMD.... thus AMD64
x64-86 was a joint venture developed between IBM and AMD fyi.
The cross-licensing agreement also has something to do with second sources and the US government. I think the government wanted an alternative source of x86 processors, and so AMD delivered.
Mother F'er! That's Hot...
I bet it would be
So would this have been the PowerPC G6/7?
It is compatible (in the loose sense of the word) with G5. 32/64bit software will not notice the difference.
H/W is obviously completely different...
Looks like a good Counterstrike map.
This would fit the bill for the next Xbox very nicely, maybe up the ante a bit with a second CPU. Microsoft are you watching, this cpu is packing some serious horses.....
This is Enterprise server class proc, not the next console chip....
its also gonna cost some serious money too. Just hope the next xbox is under like $500.
@Willis
After Sony's whole fiasco, I just can't see console makers launching a system above $400.
It'll most definitely run Crysis.
Apple never used actual POWER# processors. The last of the PowerPC chips in Macs was 'based' off of the POWER4. AND, Apple just stripped out the PowerPC code from the OS.
I can't wait to get one of the Power7 system in.
I bet my RPG III coded MRP system will really fly on these guys. TPS reports will generate in 1/2 the time!!! My Green Screen Machine will get even more FPS at 80x25 !!!!!
The current Ati FireStream and Nvidia Tesla already beat a single Power7 chip in peak double precision floating point performance. And this chip isn't out yet! Not to mention the new generation of GPU's, that are 2x faster then current ones, being around the corner. The only people who don't want to make the switch are old farts who still think CPU's are the future.
Ferraris suck because you can't carry a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
"peak double precision floating point performance" is only useful in specific scenarios. You running your db server and web server on your GPU? And seriously, why would you even consider "peak"? Ever hear of nominal, average, or root mean square?
Clown.
typically servers do a lot of database work, very fast, with multipul of streamlined instructions. Servers don't even need GPUs. Try using a computer for something other then gaming.
I worked for a company that built server farms with 128 Tesla GPUs... they have their uses, but I'd still rather have a CPU than a GPU for most things given the massive amount of development needed to port code from CPU to GPGPU execution
WRONG. First of all, one Power7 chip can sustain 256Gflops DP while a brand new Nvidia Tesla C1060 maxes out at 78 in DP. ATI's Firestream 9270 is far better at over 240 Gflops.
That said, The Power7 is far better because it can sustain this massive processing power on traditional, highly threaded application code for commercial applications like OLTP/Database/Web server/etc that cannot be done with a GPU.
modern massively parallel GPUs are excellent for many data parallel applications like video/image/audio processing, scientific research, etc, but are limited in application compared to a monster CPU like the Power7.
Wow I didn't know those old farts were residing on engadget.
Oh yeah because servers are so anti-parallelism. They so don't process thousands of users at the same time and they so don't multiple threads. And let us completely ignore multi million dollar super computers that mostly perform raw DP computation. I can't wait for the first GPU to come out that does all the above....oh wait.
@loosely_coupled
This is from nvidia's Tesla S1070 spec list:
Double Precision floating point performance (peak): 311 to 345 GFlops
This is from wikipedia on the Power7 chip:
max 258.6 GFLOPS per chip
You should have done some better research than using the first outdated article you came across.
I'm sure Intel making a x86 compliant GPU is sooooo stupid. What are they thinking? Million cored CPU's is clearly the way to go...oh wait.
What a bunch of pricks.