IBM Releases Power7 Processor 231
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.
4.14GHz? (Score:2, Interesting)
What happened to the "3GHz ceiling"? Why can IBM go above it but Intel, AMD and VIA are stuck below it?
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Different architecture maybe? A little bit like how RISC could clock faster than CISC back in the day.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Funny)
You learn something new every day.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:4, Funny)
There probably were better ways of increasing computational speed using multicore processor designs than just increasing the clock speed. Kind of like going from a V4 engine to V6 being a better option in terms of power than increasing the individual piston HP of the V4 from 25 to 30.
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What stops you from doing *both*? ^^
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Cost. Spending an extra 500$ to double the power makes sense. Spending 5,000$ to increase the power a measly 20% is rather foolish either way you look at it by comparison.
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Spending 5,000$ to increase the power a measly 20% is rather foolish either way you look at it by comparison.
Not if your work load doesn't scale with additional cores. Then $5000 for 20% extra speed can be worth it.
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The cost of producing these higher clock speeds appears to be very cost and technologically prohibitive. The operations that can't be parallelized are apparently not important enough to justify higher clock speeds.
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Well it gives IBM a niche to fit the POWER in -- a niche which Intel would have liked to fit the Itanium in as well. Most people won't spend $12k per CPU though.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Funny)
There probably were better ways of increasing computational speed using multicore processor designs than just increasing the clock speed. Kind of like going from a V4 engine to V6 being a better option in terms of power than increasing the individual piston HP of the V4 from 25 to 30.
Back in my day, manufacturers used to slap a turbo button on the front of the case.
And we liked it that way.
Now get off my lawn!
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hahaha i remember back in the day trying to argue with a guy at school that my 'xt' machine was faster than his '386' one because i had a turbo button and he didn't. it was even called 'hal 2 turbo' from memory, which, after having seen 2001 space odyssey is even *more* awesome than i thought back then haha
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:4, Funny)
"Back in my day, manufacturers used to slap a turbo button on the front of the case.
And we liked it that way."
Noobs...
Back in MY day, I used to wax the strings on my abacus to lessen bead friction.
We LOVED it that way.
Now get off my peat bog!
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Insightful)
First, there is no 3GHz ceiling, so you're begging the question. Second, these processors use specialized cooling - not run of the mill cheapo barely-enough heatsinks. If AMD or Intel spent $20 more on their heatsinks, they'd easily be selling 3.4-3.8GHz processors. But the profit margin isn't there. Third, power usage hikes as you increase voltage high enough to hit those speeds. Most people running nuclear explosion simulations on a 4GHz processor don't care, people running 30,000 machines in a design center...do care.
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If AMD or Intel spent $20 more on their heatsinks, they'd easily be selling 3.4-3.8GHz processors. ...
Third, power usage hikes as you increase voltage high enough to hit those speeds.
You’re contradicting yourself. The reason they can in fact not easily ramp up the CPU speed, is exactly this increase in voltage. Which increases temperature at a cubic speed relative to processor speed. (See the Pentium 4, for what that results in.)
And because your bring not a single actual argument to why you think there is no 3GHz ceiling (actually it’s a gray area above 3 GHz), I call your argument... busted! ;)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no contradiction. Power usage is less of an issue on higher end "enthusiast" chips. They could easily sell 3.6GHz chips in this space with better heatsinks (as evidenced by...people running them at 4GHz easily on air cooling).
In the commodity space, even with better cooling, the power usage increases disproportionately as voltage goes up. There is a sweet spot, and it isn't currently >3GHz.
Finally, I didn't point out why there is no 3GHz ceiling because it takes 30 seconds of googling to see that there are currently chips selling at > 3GHz, and there have in the past been x86 CPUs up to 3.73GHz.
Busted my ass.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fairy dust! IBM has captured several pixies and uses them to craft its magical chips.
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Don't forget that one of those 4GHz CPUs probably costs over 10 times as much as an equivalent Intel or AMD part. A decent PC costs as much as a car payment -- a decent POWER machine costs as much as a car.
The price is old, but a couple years ago a 5GHz Power6 CPU cost $15k for a dual-core module (with 4 threads) plus $30k to activate each core. That means you'd pay $75k total to use both cores of the CPU module. I'm sure Intel would have no problem supplying 5GHz CPUs at $75k each, but it's unlikely that t
Direct comparisons are bad (Score:5, Informative)
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The Itanium is more that just superscalar, it is explicit parallelism. You can accomplish the same feat with superscalar and out-of-order execution but it takes far more silicon and it tends to have some odd corner cases.
POWER and Itanium are both pretty slick architectures but Itanium is definitely a generation later in design. If only Intel were willing to bet the company on it, about 10 years ago, we would all be using it today.
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Had Intel bet the company on it, AMD would likely be the dominant processor vendor today...
It doesn't matter how good the IA64 architecture is, customers want to run their existing applications, most of which are compiled for x86 and don't come with source code. That leaves you with emulation, which i doubt Intel could make faster than native... Intel can't move to a new architecture because they are held back by all the millions of closed source applications out there.
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If only you could go back in time and convince Intel of this! The first generation of Itaniums actually did x86 emulation in hardware. A brilliant idea: the only problem with it was that it was actually slower than software emulators (which themselves were pretty slow).
Anyway I don't think Itanium was every supposed to replace x86. This was before x86-64 existed and Intel thought it would be their only 64-bit chip.
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That whole philosophy went out the window when Intel couldn't make a compiler good enough to make Itanium work well in all situation; which to this day -- despite having more software engineers than silicon guys -- they still don't.
Scheduling things beforehand will only get you so much. It sounds good on paper in a "look how much silicon we save" kind of way but the reality is, explicit parallelism and static scheduling simply aren't good in this day of variable memory latencies, multi-tiered caches and peo
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I'm not sure what your trying to say here could you use a car analogy?
Ferrari vs volvo Truck? Straight out speed, vs. load capacity.
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (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.
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Since no Tukwila servers have been announced, we don't even know how much they will cost.
As a sysadmin for a company with POWER5 and 6 equipment, all I can say is if you have to ask you can't afford it. Part of the reason why jumping ship to RHEL + Oracle running on a VMware cluster is looking increasingly appealing to managment.
Uh... Power7 also executes 6 instr/cycle (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you but POWER7 can dispatch 6 instructions per cycle as well.
That little fact was revealed last year during the Hot Chips 21 presentation.
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:4, Insightful)
Itanium procs=64, cores=128
So double the Itaniums almost gets you to where Power is.
Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your point is valid, but that isn't what I was responding to.
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Because there's more shit on the die to fail and go bad, quickly rendering your cheap solution useless and slow.
Also, it needing more processors to get the same job done means it's likely a weak POS to start.
Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also add that depending on the task, the cheap solution would be slower if the task had serial parts that could not be separated into threads. For instance if a task takes 1,000 cycles and all of the instructions must be done in a precise order, a quad-core processor running at 2.0 GHz would be slower and be of lower utility than a single core 4.0 GHz processor, assuming all other things are equal. The quad-core ends up working at half the speed of the single core and the quad-core also has the penalty of three idle cores draining electricity.
I would also imagine that these newer POWER7 processors carry over the decimal floating point units present in the POWER6. Yes, floating point units that operate in base-10 as opposed to base-2. Not necessarily of much value for scientific purposes, but great for preserving accuracy in financial calculations. One gets to avoid the base-10 to base-2 conversion and the conversion back that can severely hurt accuracy with only a binary floating point unit. One also gets a nice speed up by doing decimal math in hardware as opposed to the other option of software decimal math.
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I do indeed. I work with semiconductor fab quite often. It's part of my business selling horticultural LED lighting.
And LEDs are prone to the same failures as any other semiconductor-based technology.
Go suck it. :P
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If processor A can get the job done more cheaply with twice the processors, why would I care?
Because most actual work loads scale worse than TPC-C. For most actual loads you're better off with half as many cores which are twice as fast. Also, the Itanium is a horrible power hog, so you'd likely lose out on your electricity bill too. If your workload scales nicely, go for Xeon or Opteron, nothing in the Itanium or Power space can beat those for performance/price.
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You pay some licensing costs PER PROCESSOR (or PER CORE, or a combination thereof). As such, it might be cheaper to buy a $100k, 32 processors server than a similar performance, $50k, 64 processors server.
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Because performance per watt is also important, if you have twice as many physical processors and twice as many cores you will also need all the supporting infrastructure (ie sockets for those processors to go in) etc... Not to mention the extra space required.
And more power consumption also equals more cost.
Otherwise, why use powerful machines at all, why not a cluster of the cheapest machines you can find?
Incidentally, something which performs half as well needs to be considerably cheaper or it just won't
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Price / Performance is not all that matters. If it was we would probably be running tens of di-shrunk 486 cores in PCs today. Complexity matters as well. Nobody wants to deal with hardware nonsense in software. In the PC world you can't even get people to write threaded apps; and you're going to tell me its ok to ask developers to deal with 2x as many cores to get the same amount of computing done? That is going to complicate you application a great deal!
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Real question (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Real question (Score:4, Funny)
I think you clicked the wrong link on Tom's Hardware.
The question here is whether it can run Linux - followed shortly by a debate on how terrible Ubuntu is.
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The question here is whether it can run Linux - followed shortly by a debate on how terrible Ubuntu is.
Yes, it can. And approximately <------> this horrible.
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I'm not sure, but their pre-lease benchmarks on Duke Nuke'em forever was off the chart. No. Really. True story.
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Ah, AIX (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.
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Minor note: PowerPC was the line of processors used in the Apple computers. POWER (as in Power7) is the server line of processors with it's roots in the as/400 servers back in the 90's.
The first POWER processor was in the first RS/6000 machines, back when the AS/400's were still IMPI machines. In any case, POWER/PowerPC/Power Architecture/etc. are all close cousins....
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Re:Ah, AIX (Score:5, Informative)
AIX....the last Unix you can't just "get" a copy of, but need to actually buy the hardware (a la the Mac).
Don't forget HPUX.
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Re:Ah, AIX (Score:4, Informative)
And Mac OS X.
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And Mac OS X.
http://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
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Hmm? You certainly can "just 'get' a copy of" OS X. Amazon keeps offering me it for $24.99, with free shipping on an order over $25. Nobody checks to see if you own a Mac before they ship it to you.
Apple skunkworks? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm curious whether or not Apple is maintaining a parallel dev. of OSX for this line of IBM chips the same way that the Intel version of OSX was lurking in the dark from 2000 until 2006.
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Re:Apple skunkworks? (Score:5, Funny)
LOL You're in no position to know.
I am, however. But my NDA forbids me from saying anything.
Re:Apple skunkworks? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I just checked said NDA, as it has been at least five years since I worked for them, and my NDA is over, so....
Support has NEVER been fully dropped and never will unless IBM becomes non-viable in the marketplace. On top of that, long-term contracts Apple has with some companies pretty much ensures that they keep some minimal amount of POWER support active, at least into the next decade.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your bullshit reality bubble? Get a real job in the industry and maybe you'd have half a clue.
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But is your information now 5 years old?
5 years ago, PPC machines were still being sold...
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They will most certainly never return to Power.
And 640k should be enough for everyone. The world crazy place... who'd have imagined the impact that such diverse things as the PS3, ARM processors and Android would have had on the industry. If the mobile world goes off x86 (the death of the laptop) would power pcs be so hard to imagine?
ARM was Archimedes, a failed/expensive desktop (Score:2)
You should talk about the history of ARM, what a sadly failed British Amiga like Desktop's CPU before they made wise choice of becoming a pure R&D house.
People talking about processors and thinks they are educated enough to the point of comparing enterprise Unix processors should start with Wikipedia information.
Imagine talking to someone early 1990s and show that Psion weird handheld and tell that weird OS will be powering 40% of smart devices in the future.
People doesn't even know that there is 1990s
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i find it more likely that they are looking into running osx on a multi-core cortex-A9 or later, with some special sauce from PA semi added on top.
You don't need to maintain such thing (Score:2)
Apple doesn't need to do skunk works, all they need (and possibly do) is make sure they don't use any X86 specific stuff to the point of not being able to release it for any other CPU arch. Who would be that stupid? Well, Adobe. Adobe couldn't release their half ass Premiere for PPC along with another half ass audio editor making Premiere a further joke until Apple switched to X86.
As Apple maintains OS X for ARM Arch right now (via iPhone/iPad OSX), they aren't really doing the mistake of relying to X86 arc
From your link (Score:3, Informative)
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If you'd read the article you're linking to, you'd see that PowerPC was "a modified version of the POWER architecture" and that POWER3 "was only used in IBM's RS/6000 servers."
Commercial sales? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to wonder why IBM is (at least, as of now) limiting these processors in their own hardware.
I can understand the initial economic advantage: they'd gain more profit from server sales, and would be able to sell Linux servers at a fairly non-trivial mark-up (on base hardware cost, to them).
But what is gained there is probably trivial compared to commercial marketing of the chips/boards (OEM sales). I suspect it might also avoid scrutiny from antitrust lawyers more easily. Why wouldn't they do this? I'd certainly love a processor like that; it'd be incredible. 1/4th the power envelope of the Power6, and twice the performance (assuming it means core clock)? That's incredible: the 3.2GHz Power6 is rated at under 100W TDP.
Such a processor might just sway Apple to go back to the Power architecture, I'd think. Linux will run on them, obviously; the only thing you couldn't run on them is Windows (and even that might be possible down the road with only a little work on MS's part).
The only two reasons I can imagine are 'exclusivity' and 'insufficient fab capacity'. That second one would certainly do it on its own.
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A non-IBM POWER7 system would end up looking pretty much like an IBM POWER7 system, and you can bet it wouldn't be cheaper, so what's the point? If you want POWER7, buy it from IBM.
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Why do you suppose being able to buy similar systems from multiple vendors wouldn't drive down the price?
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You don't spend $10,000 per CPU then put in a small amount of crappy ram and a single tiny SATA harddisk.
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I don't know what a 3.2GHz Power6 costs, but last I checked a 4.2GHz Power6 cost $12k! Somehow I don't think Apple will be swayed to using them unless IBM can sell them at 1% of their current price.
dom
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Antitrust laws don't apply to big companies just because they're big companies...
Significantly more incredible one or two quad-core AMD or Intel x86-64 CPUs?
Why? Does IBM have anything that compares in power usage and performance to a mobile x86-64 CPU, such as the 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU in my lapt
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1/4th the power envelope of the Power6
I don't read it that way. I read it as 1/4th the power/performance. I bet they'll be 100W+ like the Power 6, just 4 times as powerful.
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The ability to run windows (either under a vm or natively) helps sell quite a few apple machines these days, it gives people a fallback if they don't like osx or an option if they have a few windows apps they require.
Also, Apple sell a lot of laptops, a POWER7 would not really be suitable.
LPARs (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM gear gets you LPARs, with a real hypervisor that is laps ahead of all the other stuff.
Wouldn't it be cool? (Score:2)
Imagine a PowerMac with a couple of these in it, and assload (actual technical term for large quantity) of RAM and a big display?
Oh, I forgot, the new improved Apple has told us that the Intel chip give us, the users, better performance.
I actually think Apple started it's slide into evildom with switching from Power to Intel.
Oh well, we can dream.
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Imagine a PowerMac with a couple of these in it, and assload (actual technical term for large quantity) of RAM and a big display?
Yeah and it would sell miserably at around $75,000 a piece.
Oh, I forgot, the new improved Apple has told us that the Intel chip give us, the users, better performance.
Considering that you could buy around 30 of the highest end i7s for the same price as a single Power7 I would think you would get far better performance per dollar.
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Performance Comparison & More (Score:2)
I've ran through the performance numbers announced by IBM and what I found at spec.org (specint_rate & specfp_rate) of the other CPU's and roughly the following picture (give/take 20%):
So it looks to me that performance-wise Power and x86_64 are similar. Both seem almost three times as fast as Itanium/Sparc. However. in the commerci
The CPU for Playstation 4? (Score:2)
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Lets hope it looks better than that hideous mock up photo. My mum has a kitchen radio that looks similar to that.
Why can't Sony just build a playstation that looks like a nice sophisticated piece of stacking hi-fi instead of either
something that looks like it escaped from toys-r-us (PS1 & 2) or looks like something Bauhaus would have in their
living room (PS3) ?
CPU speed vs memory bandwidth, I don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
I can understand why you would get a Power chip for pure number crunching.
But having a lot of data to chew away, I use p-threading for the larger jobs and let the rest of the jobs over to the os.
I was always under the assumption that data has to be delivered to the cpu fast, very fast and since the Power6 rs6000 only supports ddr2 I don't get it.
We recently bought a new rs6000, which has the Power6 in it(still has to be delivered), but the memory is 'only' ddr2, can someone enlighten me why this machine wou
Re:This is Bad News (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, because the Power series is such a global moneymaking powerhouse, right?
These chips (and Itanium) are niche. In fact, the commodity chips are getting so powerful across the entire CPU segment from embedded to HPC computing that they will start eating into the market of even these niche chips. Why buy a Power7 when you can buy 3-4 Nehalems, be twice as fast, and spend 1/2 the money? There are exceptions, but they're becoming fewer and fewer.
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There are exceptions, but they're becoming fewer and fewer.
That's not necessarily true. As the top end moves up, new opportunities and markets are created that were not there before.
Re:This is Bad News (Score:4, Informative)
You'd buy a Power7 because it comes with 63 other Power7 friends in a single box and runs an operating system specifically designed for the ridiculous number of cores and capable of handling even the most data intensive legacy applications.
I agree that the high end server market is becoming smaller and smaller as time goes on but in reality there's still a huge backbone of legacy applications that require the sort of processing throughput only a single whopping great server can provide. The kind of applications that draw $150,000 3 month contracts for developers because nobody knows a damn thing about them, general public included.
Re:This is Bad News (Score:4, Informative)
You buy it for the hypervisor, massive IO, and capacity upgrade on demand. Forget what you know about virtualization from xen and VMWare. The POWER hypervisor lets you add (or remove) ram, buses, and processors from a running server. You can even set the memory and cpu to pull from a shared pool (with set priorities and limits). The internal 10Gb network doesn't hurt either.
Try scaling your xen system when you are IO bound to disk. POWER offers physical and (fast) virtual IO, giving each partition "big iron" IO capacity.
POWER is made by people who understand scaling. Commodity boxes are made for people who like big numbers printed on the side of the box and don't understand why high CPU and memory numbers are useless if your disk array can't keep up.
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Anyone have data on how these compare to x86 and Intel's latest creations? Presumably, one could write an efficient algorithm for a variety of common computing tasks and port it to the different chips to get a cross-architecture performance estimate.
That's called SPEC CPU; here are some results: http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=107244&threadid=107238&roomid=2 [realworldtech.com]
Re:Query (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Query (Score:4, Funny)
I like your folk etymology. It neatly excises surveying from the discussion.
Re:Query (Score:5, Informative)
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Is there anyone who can afford POWER7, but can't afford a RHEL or SLES subscription?
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This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if IBM were supporting Linux on POWER because AIX has become or is becoming too expensive to maintain. They're still working on AIX and still shipping it, and it may still work better than Linux on POWER, but in the end, one IBM can't compete with a system that has both the open source community and a lot of major corporations backing it. So they've done the wise thing and started supporting Linux, so that they can eventually axe AIX and get a lot of wor