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Upgrades IBM

POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010 73

Posted by timothy
from the not-necessarily-early-2010 dept.
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."
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POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010 More

POWER7 To Ship In First Half of 2010

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  • Re:so, if Apple... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2009, @03:11PM (#28785879)

    They would still be an online music store.

  • Re:so, if Apple... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by robthebloke (1308483) on Wednesday July 22 2009, @05:16PM (#28787927)
    And that's really the problem with the cell. You need 2 or 3 good (additional) engineers to get the best out of it - and finding people good enough is not an easy task. The biggest problem however, given the current economic climate, is that most games companies are struggling to find the extra cash needed to pay their wages. Given the number of PS3's out there vs the number of Wii's and 360's in the wild, it's hard to justify that additional cost for the SKU with the least market share. The result is that the PS3 games aren't fully exploiting the hardware, and i suspect only a small handful ever will.

  • Re:No competitive laptop offering! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SteeldrivingJon (842919) on Wednesday July 22 2009, @06:23PM (#28788851) Homepage Journal

    Sure it'd be pricey, but there's a niche for this kinda stuff; SGI & Sun workstations come to mind

    You might want to look into how SGI and Sun are doing these days. Especially SGI.

  • Re:so, if Apple... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2009, @08:44AM (#28794029)

    It's not just that. Each one is good at different things.

    Massively parallel, but fairly simple tasks (like graphics) are dominated by the the PS3 (if you want to design an engine that renders EVERY snowflake in a snowstorm, the PS3 is going to destroy the 360.

    The 360, on the other hand, is good for modestly parallel, complex calculations.

    Modern games need both, and the complex computations can't always be split into small enough chunks that the PS3 will do them well.

    So, it's not that one is better than the other, but that both tend to do different things. If I want lots of eye candy (dead or alive beach volleyball 2 for example), I would want the game made on the PS3. If I wanted something with a lot of complex/smart AI and some more immersive gameplay, I would want the 360.

Love is a grave mental disease. -- Plato