Sure, there's not much chance of popping down to your local hypermarket and picking up something with a
Power7 roaring inside, but there's also nothing stopping you from a bit of vicarious investigation, now is there? IBM's
eight-core, 1.2 billion-transistor Power7 chips have begun shipping
as promised, with the entry-level Power 750 Express starting at a few bucks over $34,000. That offers you some truly supreme computing power, as each of the eight cores can run four simultaneous threads for up to 32 parallel tasks, with 8MB of embedded DRAM (acting as L3 cache)
per core. The top-tier POWER 780 system maxes out with either eight 3.8GHz eight-core chips or eight 4.1GHz quad-core units, allied to a maximum of 2TB of DDR3 RAM and up to 24 SSDs -- though you'll have to call IBM to find out the price (presumably so that a trained professional can counsel you after hearing the spectacular number). Watch the video after the break while we try to cajole IBM into sending us one for benchmarking.
posted February 12th 2010 9:38AM
"Yes, but does it run t3h Crysis!!?!?"
*rolls eyes* [/sarcasm]
@cjwild
In all seriousness though this thing is pretty impressive, 8Mb of cache per core ? :)
Though, something tells me I wouldn't be comfortable handling a $30k + chip.
@cjwild Not unless you can get Crytek to port the game to the Power architecture. So no, it won't play Crysis, but it probably could simulate a nuclear crisis :)
@r3loaded
lol yes yes, I'm aware, I'm just fueling the troll fire for all the people who only care if something will "run Crysis"
IT WAS FUNNY TO MEEEEE :(
@Atkins
Clearly you have missed the [/sarcasm] portion of my post.
@Atkins haha fair enough then. CONTINUE
@cjwild Well it still needs a graphic card to run Crysis.
@cjwild
I thought that was for the whole machine $30k+
@cjwild
Crysis has been rumored to come to the Sony PS3 gaming device. With it's Cell Processor, it also has 8 cores (jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba); but more attuned to gaming and R&D. So there you go, I just saved you $33,700, unless you are running a Server Farm!
I like how they felt the need to include the word "Express" in name so you know it is fast. Really they should have used "Xpress".It would have been way more indicative of how fast this chip really is.
@abelock I like how you did not understand that the term "express" in this product means: entry level, not fast.
@tterremmotto thanks for pointing that out Mr. or Ms. Wanker Buzzkill. Maybe it's an industry term for entry level. but who gives a fuck. I just thought it was amusing that's all...like from an English language
I think I found the matrix.
"The top-tier POWER 780 system maxes out with either eight 3.8GHz eight-core chips or eight 4.1GHz quad-core units, allied to a maximum of 2TB of DDR3 RAM and up to 24 SSDs"
*jaw DROPS*
please I had that in my sandwich this morning, something must be wrong with your jaw
They should install folding@home on it [although I dont think there is a POWER client....]
@Luffy There is.
@Luffy It's no a problem. the CPU will complite a PPC version, install it, and seed the files for others to download. Skynet is enabled!
@BeingBoston
POWER is not the same as PPC. PPC is a subset of the POWER architecture without quite a few high-end extensions.
@Kira . Latest PPC chips included POWER features. Right now IBM doesn't even draw distinction between PPC and POWER - it's all called POWER.
E.g. we have several IBM's AIX servers running on the chip similar to those found in later PowerMacs. Yet, they are labeled everywhere as "POWER" not "PowerPC."
Wouldn't it be great if once someone took a beast like that and run some everyday tasks on it? ie video encoding, gaming etc? OK we know it's fast and expensive but by what margin? Anand, are you listening? :)
@djaris Yes, because of all those games that run on high-end IBM server platforms. This ain't x86.
@djaris This message is a call to arms to all lottery winners - build a rig with these chips and post it on youtube encoding mp3s.
Ive got a WoW server to fill.....
@Atkins until you get a power outage =E
Get it? POWER... outage...
...and a power-off button...
Thank God Apple doesn't use PPC chips anymore else we'd be bombarded by G7 fastest supercomputer in the world on your desk adds...
@pvito and with CPUs costing $24000 it'll fit right in Apple's pricing scheme.
@pvito Try "shoehorning" this thing in to a laptop, as Steve said. It's really clear now how little IBM cared about the consumer market and how shitty the power processors where for anything else then the PowerMac
@kopmis Is that why all three current game consoles are running chips based on versions of the Power architecture? Sounds like 'consumer' to me...
(I agree they didn't have a competitive offer, but the selection for all game consoles does tell you the chips aren't absolute crap.)
... HOLY COW, 1080p youtube!
@ttsgeb
Yeah i know! Too bad i'm on a linux machine....
http://xkcd.com/619/
PowerMac G6 rumors revived?
I love when they start talking about OLTP, business intelligence, analytics at the same time and how flexible this chip is ... yet the only examples they give is classic statistical "cancer research" app which heavily utilizes processor and is probably not so I/O intensive.
In my experience the time when data warehousing needed 32 processor server are gone, the processors are fast enough and can easily scale to grids, now it's mostly about I/O in data warehousing and how to minimize it. That's why Oracle came with their Exadata and database aware linux OS.
@Jimbojones: well, warehouses are not the only application field, you know. It is rather a niche - though one with fat profit margins.
Lots of proprietary business apps are written in something like Java and require quite amount of CPU/RAM resources to run. Such applications are what the *nix servers used mostly for.
IBM would likely use the servers together with the custom server apps (e.g. Lotus Domino) their global services unit is used to sell around the world.
@Dummy00001 did you watch the video? He is talking specifically about data warehousing and BI
@Atkins
Or like... y'know, save anything.
I though something was up when wikipedia said Feb 8
I don't get the point. I could build 34 $1000 computers for the cost of this one processor. Is this one processor really faster than the cluster you could build with $34,000?
@willinwi
Yes. Because this is for server clusters, not just desktop computers.
@willinwi Your 34 $1,000 computers would probably draw over an order of magnitude more power than a computer running this chip, plus you'd be dealing with communicating through networking (and then ultimately over the PCI bus). IBM is a major corporation and if they invest the millions of dollars to produce these chips, it's safe to say that someone along the line thought of that question and decided that it's advantageous to use these chips.
@willinwi
Yes
Having it on one chip would be a thousand times faster and more powerful.
Plus this is advancement in technology, get over it.
@Solipsism I didn't think of the power or bandwidth parts of the equation. Good point. As far as major corporations deciding that there is a market for products, not such a good point. Windows. ME.
I wonder though, what is the cost of the power relative to the other costs of running these systems, and how many workloads really need that kind of bandwidth between nodes. I have little to no actual experience with parallel programming, but I would think that most of the workloads these chips will be used for could save money with a cluster and a rethinking of the project distribution. I very well could be wrong.
@willinwi
Cheaper than hardware that can be aggregated together? no. Cheaper than LICENSING all the cores in those servers with enterprise class cluster OS and software, building an infiniband infrastructure, and having code that's AIX cluster aware? NO, not even close. not to mention the differences in power draw, cooling, and rack space costs...
@willinwi I guarantee you that a computer with i7 and 4 tesla boards would smoke this thing, and the whole thing would cost maybe 1/15th the price of just this CPU
@willinwi btw, this isn;t a 34K processor, this is a 34K chassis that takes 4 of them (comes with one) 32GB of RAM, SAS controller, 8 hot swap bays, 32 RAM slots (with 32GB total populated across 8 of them), 2x 74GB 15K SAS drives, and more.
Plus, this chassis is expandible, by interlinking with up to 3 others, plus memory and IO drawers to run a dozen cards and up to 128 total RAM slots. Oh, and you can add CPUs and RAM while it's RUNNING
These things are insane.
We're looking at a pair of 770s, 8x8 processors each, with 512GB of RAM each, and some interconnects, and we'll be consolidating every single AIX server we have today (about 30 of them) across VIO (Think VMWare with better hardware integration including being able to dedicate PCI cards to virtual machines as if they were installed bare metal), and we'll have about 40% of it's capacity to spare.
@willinwi
Depends on the type of work being done. Generally when it comes to high end computing hardware is almost always cheaper than man power. Say you have to bring in some clustering gurus, some sys admins to take care of the server farm, etc. You're not saving any money in most cases.
I want this in my phone
@cdubuc Snapdragon? *pssh* how about my Power7-interdimensionalDragon?!