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.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:3, Informative)
Different architecture maybe? A little bit like how RISC could clock faster than CISC back in the day.
Direct comparisons are bad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Commercial sales? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:3, Informative)
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 they'd have many takers, so you're stuck with CPUs that are only 3GHz (but go almost as fast as IBM's 5GHz parts).
dom
Re:Ah, AIX (Score:4, Informative)
And Mac OS X.
From your link (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Query (Score:3, Informative)
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:4.14GHz? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Commercial sales? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Query (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:1, Informative)
And that's why pi is pretty much still 3. It's a cunning result deduced by that same excellent mathematics school of thought. You know, the one that the ancient egiptians said "fuck that shit" almost 4 thousand years ago.
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.
Re:Commercial sales? (Score:3, Informative)
You don't spend $10,000 per CPU then put in a small amount of crappy ram and a single tiny SATA harddisk.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:1, Informative)
Computer nerds: You mean inline-4 engine, not V4. There is no V4, boxer-4 maybe. Stop saying V4... ...and all are inferior to the gorgeous balanced inline-6 and V12!
Re:LPARs (Score:2, Informative)
IBM gear gets you LPARs, with a real hypervisor that is laps ahead of all the other stuff.
You're absolutely right. We're just finishing migrating our data warehouse Database, ETL, and BI systems from smaller x86 boxes over to LPARs on a mid-upper-range POWER6 box. The performance and the on-the-fly configuration that our AIX admin can do on this box is SIMPLY AMAZING. We have lots of boxes running in VMWare environment, too. But the capabilities there performance-wise don't even touch IBM's visualization.