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."
so, if Apple... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:so, if Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Look at Cell on PS3... (Score:4, Interesting)
POWER is an ordinary RISC architecture, not at all like the Cell. Programming for it isn't a problem.
Re:No competitive laptop offering! (Score:3, Interesting)
Maintaining a branch of the OS complete with drivers for a separate chip architecture is non-trivial. Undoubtedly, someone in Apple marketing has a spreadsheet that compares development & maintenance costs of each chip available (ARM, CELL, Intel, Power) with anticipated product demand. Right now the numbers don't work out.
Seth