IBM launches Power7 chip, systems ( Feb 2010...products Aug 2010 benchmarks)

CNET ^ | February 7, 2010 10:37 PM PST | Brooke Crothers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

BM on Monday is launching its long-anticipated Power7 processor and systems based on the chip.

IBM Power7 chip(Credit: IBM)

The processor is a big step for IBM, integrating eight processing cores--four times the number of cores in the prior-generation Power6--in one chip package, with each core capable of executing four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors--systems that Power7 will compete with--typically have two threads per processing core and contain four cores.

Blg Blue has already tipped its hand on the Power7 chip in discussions about its upcoming Blue Water supercomputer.

Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group, told CNET last year.

Rivals include Hewlett-Packard servers based on Intel's Xeon and "Tukwila" Itanium processors and servers from Sun Microsystems.

New Power7 systems

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Benchmarks... ARMONK, N.Y. - 17 Aug 2010::

IBM Breaks Double Digit Performance Barrier With 10 Million Transactions Per Minute

***********************************EXCERPT****************************************

IBM achieved the industry's highest ever TPC-C (transaction processing) benchmark result using a Power Systems configuration with DB2, hitting 10,366,254 tpmC,(1). The IBM result delivered the follow breakthrough results including:

• Performance more than 2.5 times better than HP's best result(2), 69% greater performance per core, and 2.1 times better  price/performance
• Performance more than 35% better than Oracle's best result(3), 2.7 times better performance per core, 41% better price performance, and 35% better energy efficiency per transaction

[Lx]

Is this chip x86 or x64 bit pin and opcode compatible?

What are it’s uses if not; I’m sure IBM has a plan.

[updatedscreenname]

The plan would be go target the high end Oracle installations and convert them to Power7 and DB2. The hate that many customers had for SUN has been transferred to Oracle.

[antiRepublicrat]

Is this chip x86 or x64 bit pin and opcode compatible?

No and no. It's for mainframes and supercomputers. Just 13 8-chip POWER7 servers (104 processors total) would be on the TOP500 supercomputer list, edging out a system with 1,284 quad-core Xeon processors.

One chip is going to cost far more than your whole computer.

[antiRepublicrat]

Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor

Hehe, video game console technology comes to the mainframe. Not your usual selling point.

[CodeJockey]

IBM classifies its servers as:

XSeries - Wintel based pc/server
zSeries - Big Iron (does anyone remember the mainframe?)
pSeries - AIX (UNIX based OS)
iSeries - As400, iSeries, Systemi (proprietary based OS)

The power7 is used in the p and i series. Not sure about the zSeries.

[lefty-lie-spy]

Cool. I’m loving my Sun T2000s and T5120s.
But getting all the zones set up and processor groups in the right places for Oracle is another full time job in itself. I love processor technologies, but if they are on Unix it’s pretty platform agnostic. Only the programmers care at this point because all code can be recompiled for any architecture these days.

[Lx]

That’s for sure. I remember working in a financial institution, IBM made a deal where they would take the SUN machines and replace them with small IBM RS6000s.
It also helped that we had two ‘big iron’ mainframes.
They did it lighting fast, too.

[antiRepublicrat]

I can do a complex database query over a few million records on a modern multi-processor x64 server with 10K SCSI RAID storage over fiber and gobs of RAM, and it can take a little while to get a result. Years ago I saw a complex query over tens of millions of records on IBM big iron, and the result was almost instant.

The hard processor crunching speed never impressed me so much as the mind-boggling throughput these things are capable of.