IBM launches Power7 chip for pSeries systems
February 7, 2010
IBM on Monday is launching its long-anticipated Power7 processor and systems based on the chip.
IBM Power7 chip
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.
Big 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
The new Power7 systems include:
- IBM Power 780: a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 Power7 cores.
- IBM Power 770: a midrange system with up to 64 Power7 cores, featuring higher performance per core than Power6 processors and using up to 70 percent less energy for the same number of cores as Power6 processors.
- IBM Power 755: a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores.
