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Comments: 231 + - Hardware: IBM Releases Power7 Processor on Tuesday February 09 2010, @12:40AM
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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.
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IT: POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010 73 comments
Submission: IBM releases Power7 processor by Anonymous Coward
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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?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Different architecture maybe? A little bit like how RISC could clock faster than CISC back in the day.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Funny)
You learn something new every day.
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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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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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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!
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Re: (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.
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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.
Re:4.14GHz? (Score:4, Informative)
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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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Re: (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: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.
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Re:4.14GHz? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason why AMD and Intel don't push the high end chips is frankly there just isn't much of a market for them ATM. Since most of the games being released are for console first and PC second, they simply aren't being bottle-necked by the CPU. This is also why AMD and Nvidia are having to push multiscreen and GPGPU, because frankly a less than $100 card will play a good 80%+ of the games out there.
Second for the jobs the average Joes are doing, web surfing, music/video, maybe the occasional video conversion, even the lower end chips are well past "good enough" for them. I have been selling a lot of low end AMD dual and triple core machines lately, and all I hear from my customers is "how fast" they are, and how they never seem to slow down. With hardware acceleration on the motherboard these 2.4GHz-2.8GHz duals and triples are frankly overkill, with most of the time the CPU twiddling its thumbs. I myself bought a 925 quad when they got so cheap, but a good 90% of the time the chip is barely above idle.
So it isn't that AMD and Intel can't make them, because we have seen in the past they can, it is just there really isn't much of a market for them. To get faster than 3.2GHz you really start cranking up the heat and the power, and that equals higher electric bills most folks don't want, not to mention having fans that sound like a F15 taking off isn't very pleasant. With the new 95w like my 925 the chips rarely get above 83f idle and so far mine has maxed at 109f doing video transcoding. And the 65w duals are so quiet I have to watch when setting them up I don't turn them off when I mean to turn them on, because i simply don't hear any noise. Folks nowadays seem to care much more about that than the MHz race anymore.
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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)
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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Re: (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:Direct comparisons are bad (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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Re:Uh, did you look at your link? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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Re: (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.
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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
Re: (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: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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Re: (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 peo
Re: (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.
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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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.
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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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.
From your link (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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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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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You don't spend $10,000 per CPU then put in a small amount of crappy ram and a single tiny SATA harddisk.
LPARs (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM gear gets you LPARs, with a real hypervisor that is laps ahead of all the other stuff.
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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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.
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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)
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Re:Query (Score:4, Funny)
I like your folk etymology. It neatly excises surveying from the discussion.
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Re:Query (Score:5, Informative)
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