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?
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.
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.
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:1, Interesting)
Until they are superscalar and vectorial they can only go to their bed and cry.... damned programmers that failed linear algebra!
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Power + Linux = DEAD END (Score:1, Interesting)
The average mere moral will never get their hands on a power7 machine. There is no desktop option. I guess IBM could have one under development but people speculated the same thing about power5, power6 and nothing happened. Across the entire power landscape there aren't any machines which can compare to the average x86_64 desktop.
As a result, who from the open source landscape is actually going to be able to put time into Linux on Power?
Look at the distro story on Power,
RHEL: still there, but costs $$$ .. but you gotta wonder how long since Open Suse dropped power
Fedora: I think so
Open Suse : gone
SLES: still there, but costs $$$
Debian: wilting
ubuntu: gone
I guess IBM can shell out the bucks to get Novel and Redhat to support power, but is that really fostering a community? Can a community be a community when the price to enter is seriously expen$ive hardware and most of the people working on it aren't doing it because it's their passion but because it's a job?
Things were great when the Apple's G5 hardware hit... but nothing has been put into it's place since. Seems to me that IBM is just playing Linux lip service on power, specially reading all the posts about AIX here. It's been my experience as well.
Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 sell at all.
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 would run faster than my dual Xeon 5560 with triple channel ddr3?
The Xeon box only costed 1/2 of what the rs6000 costed
thanks in advance
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Ahh but they did! It's called x86-64!
In the end it wasn't backwards compatibility that was the problem. x86-64 has the almost all the same backwards compatibility problems that Itanium has: software developers are forced to release two binaries for their code these days, an x86-32 binary and an x86-64 binary. Obviously x86-64 took off like gang-busters, though, even though it came out like 5 years after Itanium. The reason developers are happy to develop x86-64 binaries but not Itanium binaries is that there still doesn't exist a decent compiler for Itanium.
Okay, okay, I know x86-64 trivially does x86-32 "emulation" very efficiently, which helped it out, but I think the existence of extremely good compilers is what helped it more.
Re:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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 people no longer programming in assembly.