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: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.
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.
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.
LPARs (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM gear gets you LPARs, with a real hypervisor that is laps ahead of all the other stuff.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple skunkworks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Apple is married to x86-64, not IA-32. It is unlikely that the successor to Mac OS X 10.6 will support IA-32, and it has been several years since Apple has produced hardware that is IA-32 only.
Apple is also married to ARM.
As a result of at least this bigamy, Mac OS X will be kept portable across instruction sets, byte sexes, and other architectural aspects.
With portability as a current goal, porting to another architecture should be straightfoward; it ought to be even more straightforward to port to an instruction set and architecture that is very similar to PPC.
Indeed, SSE4 has obviously been incorporating ideas from Apple Velocity Engine, making the vector part of Intel's x86-64 processor line look a lot more like those in the Apple-Intel-Motorola collaboration on PPC (~ AVE, AltiVec, VMX). The A4 chip likewise.
Finally, Apple has substantial in-house CPU design talent. The company's key problems historically have been competitively cost-effective moderate-scale manufacture of custom CPUs in the most modern processes, and the risks associated with using the most modern processes in the first place. (They still have the latter problem in their "Pro" systems, although switching to Intel has largely fixed the first.).