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
@cdubuc I heard this was built for Windows Mobile 7, the top-secret OS is still a little sluggish on it though.
Imagine, in 2020 you could compress a large data center of today into a tiny manhattan apartment... or something like that :3.
So like, can I get one?
This would last me my entire life for my desktop computer.
Wow IBM really out did them selves here. Maybe AMD could do that? Maybe they don't cause of the cost? IDK.
Can I have one of these in my Mac Pro? Piles of power! But I would be concerned about how hot this thing gets. Must put out a ton of heat!
this will be in a cell phone in 3 years
@Breuker14 Erm, cellphones of today do not touch top tier workstation processors of 3 years ago. Maybe you were joking, but just sayin.
@Nitesh i was joking...or maybe just a really big zach morris cell phone
Itanium, you are dead.
8 cores per chip, two cores per module, 4 freaking threads per core. Just in a single module thats 64 freaking threads in one module at 3.8GHz!
@Nitesh I missed the part where they say its 8 chips in one system, totaling 256 theads. And here I was being impressed by a mere 64 threads!
@Nitesh Itanium won't be dead as long as there is legacy HP-UX and OpenVMS software to run on it, and the new "Tukwila" is at least fast enough to be competitive for some workloads.
@Kira: "the new "Tukwila" is at least fast enough to be competitive for some workloads."
Huh?... Major stronghold of Itanium - scientific research - is slowly converting their apps from Itanium to GPU. Itanic can't beat that on any level: both performance and price are in favor of GPUs. (It took me awhile to realize that: no, it's not POWER or SPARC or AMD64 are major threats to Itanum - it's nVidia's Tesla/friends who cannibalize traditional to DEC and HP scientific research markets.)
Though as a platform for custom solutions, Itanium remains vital to HP's service unit. (Just like POWER to IBM's Global Services.) As long as it would be remaining profitable, they'd keep it alive. IIRC they even moved Itanic R&D under services now.
P.S. In the whole decade, the only good news for the Itanic camp was that Oracle buys Sun. I doubt we'd hear a lot about it, but it would be interesting to peek into stats to see who gained most from Sun's demise: IBM of HP.
Going to have to find my way back onto one of the big AIX based projects at work and see how these things run! Our latest Core i7 development server puts our 30k+ IBM boxes to shame, but the newest of those is two years old now.
That 2TB of RAM is a bit scary, when you considder it takes 128 slots across an external chassis dedicated JUST to RAM, and the RAM chips themselves, 16GB ECC per chip, are being quited at close to $24,000 each...
Also, the $34K for the model 750, that's not the designation of the chip, that's the Chassis, including the POWER7 3.0GHz 8 core chip(in one of it;s 4 available processor sockets), 32GB of RAM (taking 8 out of it's internal 32 RAM slots), 8 drive bays (including 2x 74GB SFF SAS 15K drives and a RAID controller), DVD RAM drive, four gigabit Ethernet ports, 2 full lentght PCI-X 2.0 (16X) slots and 3 more half length slots (8x), plus the power hypervisor hardware, support for up to 4 additional IO drawers, 8 additional memory drawrers, and all the other custom components inside the Power series systems (like hot-add memory and processors!). 34K is NOT BAD AT ALL for this system. It's quire a bit more powerful than a 4 socket quad core Xeon, and it's stack-ability and expandability are legendary.
I want to know when I can replace my brain with one of these. Screw upgrading my PC, I'm going to upgrade myself.
any idea how many flops this baby can pull? My EeePC can do 3 GFLOPS, so, like, 1000 trillion, maybe?
@onecallednick 264.96 GFLOPS per chip, the system shown has 8 chips. You do the math.
@Nitesh Ok, I did it for you :-P
This specific system would equal 2119.68GFLOPS.
The shards of my computer that explode will kill me if I attempt to jam this into my desktop
Jam it i will than
I'm going to buy one and then use it only to play Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook...
kinda of small at 1.2 billion transistors ati 58xx and nvidia fermi are double that
@Atkins Considering they'll probably sell these to the NSA, let's hope they don't add harddrives.
Do you want fries with that?
when can i expect this bad boy running in my iphone