POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010 73
BBCWatcher writes "In CPU news, IBM says that its POWER7 servers will start shipping in the first half of 2010, on schedule or perhaps even a few months early if you believe Wikipedia. Moreover, upgrades from a wide variety of POWER6 models will be mere CPU swaps, with the upgraded servers keeping their same serial numbers. (Bean counters like that.) POWER7 sports up to 8 cores per die, 4 threads per core, a clock speed a Hertz or two above 4 GHz, 45 nm process manufacturing, on-chip DDR3, and up to 1,000 micropartitions per machine. IBM claims that POWER7 will offer about 256 Gflops per die and two to three times the performance per watt as POWER6. IBM wants to keep taking orders now for its POWER6 gear (duh), so its sales reps are allegedly ready and eager to deal on 6-cum-7 packages. And it looks like that cunning plan could work rather well given Sun's Rock CPU cancellation and HP's delay of Tukwila Itanium to 2010. (Is anybody still in the server CPU race except IBM, Intel, and maybe AMD?) In 2006, POWER7 won the contest for a DARPA supercomputing R&D grant of $244 million, so you could say that each US citizen is in for about a dollar already."
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
It might have made the tiny minority of Mac Pro/Xserve buyers happy; but, unless Apple could have done a far better job than it ever had in interesting IBM in building custom chips for its needs, sticking with IBM would have made Apple's portables a complete joke.
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft taped POWER with Xbox360 and they have the most powerful console on the market (sorry PS3 fanboys, this is true, ask developers not marketing).
I think you need to study up on your processors a little more. From Wikipedia:
The cores of the [X-Box 360's] Xenon processor were developed using a slightly-modified version of the PlayStation 3's Cell Processor PPE architecture
Soooo, if they're both using basically the same CPU, the only difference comes out to what set of software you like better. (Or which set of dev tools the programmers like better.)
No competitive laptop offering! (Score:5, Informative)
They would not be in the laptop market, which has overtaken the desktop market. They did the right thing.
PowerPC has nothing that can compete with Core Duo on the laptop. Not even close.
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
Cell is potentially much more powerful, it's just harder to program (trust Sony to pick such designs, recall the PS2's Emotion Engine?)
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:4, Informative)
While true, the vast majority of the reason developers say the 360's PPC is "faster" is that it's easier to program. In terms of theoretical flops, the CELL inside the PS3 is far more capable.
If you just strung together a bunch of code and hit "compile" on GCC, the 360 will be lightyears ahead. If you have 2-3 really good engineers writing sequences for the CELL, the vertex computational power will be far superior.
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
# Sony says the PS3 can do about 2 teraflops
so, who has more power? for a real-world comparison (like you said, marketing teams suck) here's an article from tgdaily: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37621/128/ [tgdaily.com]
developers never said the 360 has more power. they said it's easier to develop for.
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:2, Informative)
Right, but that is because IBM had decided to g leave this market to PAsemi and its extremely power efficient chips (the 65 nm design needs more or less the same power as an Atom, but gives the performance of a Core Duo, not Core2 however). In its performance range, nothing still matches PAsemi's PA6T, despite the fact that it is one generation behind in process technology.
Ok, Apple bought PAsemi, what will come out of it is anyone's guess (and I don't believe a world class processor design team is only working gluing together ARM cores and peripherals on the same die for iPods and iPhones) .
About the G4, they were completely hampered by their FSB which was running at half the speed of the memory in the latest PPC based notebooks. A lower clocked MPC8610
runs about 3 times faster at 1GHz than a 1.67GHz G4 (but has an integrated dual channel DDR2 memory controller).
As somebody completely allergic to the x86 monoculture/monopoly, I'm going to buy an ARM netbook in the last quarter.
Wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Nice try, but you're wrong. The PPU of the cell is a dual-issue, in-order chip design that was developed specifically for Cell by IBM. POWER4+ is aggressively out-of-order.
Its kind of like comparing an original Pentium with a Pentium II. The name may be similar, but the internal architectures are entirely different--Pentium had dual in-order pipelines and PPro/P2/P3 were the out-of-order predecessors of the Core and Core2 architecture.
Since IBM, Toshiba and Sony all jointly have rights to use the Cell stuff in other projects, IBM took the same in-order chip design that was used in the Cell PPU and added some extra features to it, and licensed it to Microsoft as the three Xenon CPUs that run the Xbox360. So ironically enough, the PPU of the Cell and the CPU of the Xbox360 are very similar to optimize for.