IBM brings the ruckus -- and new Power7 processor

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.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 27th 2009 9:49AM]

mojojojo: you should've gone to an IBM business partner. They'd charge you a fraction of IBM's price and you get the exact same thing with IBM warranty.

Ssergio: I haven't been keeping up to date in x86 server equipment, but your proposition reminds me of a case I was working on about a year ago.

One of my customers was having some problems on their IBM SAN. While we were troubleshooting & fixing that up, they moved their production oracle instance from a power4 p650 (which was at least 4 yrs old and was runing an LPAR with 2 CPUs and 32GB RAM) to a 1yr old 8 core xeon Dell server with 32GB RAM on EMC disk. The dell could hardly keep up with the normal day to day load, which the customer estimated to be only about 2% that of the month end load. There was no mention of upgrading from the power4 system either.

Honza: I think you'd find the the power6 p595 being the flagship System p machine in IBM's current range - ie a whole frame with up to 64 CPUs instead of 4x 4RU modules with up to 32CPUs

[Solipsism Posted Aug 26th 2009 2:13PM]

The 64 bit architecture was developed by AMD.... thus AMD64

[mistoffolees Posted Aug 26th 2009 2:52PM]

"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."

You're forgetting one little thing - price. I believe Apple's average CPU price was in the $300 range at the time. IBM is probably getting $50 each for PS3 chips. That makes Apple's 4 million per year a LOT more attractive.

[looselycoupled Posted Aug 26th 2009 5:43PM]

Whats crazy is that IBM's big servers will be using multi-chip modules with FOUR Power7 CPUs on each unit. That means each server "socket" will be capable of over a Teraflop of raw processing power!! (256Gflops per chip x 4)

[Entourage Posted Aug 26th 2009 6:19PM]

x64-86 was a joint venture developed between IBM and AMD fyi.

[iofthestorm Posted Aug 26th 2009 10:15PM]

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.

[Winstons Posted Aug 27th 2009 2:37AM]

Actually, the use of an eDRAM buffer to enhance bandwith and handle latency issues was first used in the Xenos GPU of the Xbox 360. This is the main reasons the 360 GPU is able to handle the bandwith of 720p and 1080p resolutions with AA and other effects enabled. The PS3 has nothing to keep up with this concept and sacrifices have to be made in graphical quality subsequently, most 360 games look better for this reason. eDRAM is returning now on each core of the Power7 CPU which will give room to move massive amounts of data, 100 gigabyte per second of sustained data throughput to be exact, that isn't even peak performance, so there is room for even more!. That is enough to keep up with DDR3 memory refreshes almost 1:1, little or no latency, it's just really fast. Those folks at IBM are just really smart people.

If Microsoft sticks to the Power architecture, a slightly watered down cousin of this CPU could actually land in the next iteration of the 360. At the lastest the new MS console will be introduced in 2014/2015 this cpu will be followed by much faster and advanced versions around that time which will be a lot cheaper than this monster. And yes, it will run Crysis and probably even be able to do real time raytracing in a 16 core setup in tandem with the next generation general purpose GPU's ........ Serious horsepower as I said before .... Let's hope it's land in the next MS box, that would be truly mindblowing ...