IBM Reveals Jaw-Dropping Power7 System Specs
IBM Reveals Jaw-Dropping Power7 System Specs
Posted 02/12/2010 at 12:35pm
| by Bart Salisbury
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When you’ve got mountains of data to work through, you need something larger than a teaspoon. IBM’s solution is the Power7 processor--the equivalent of Krupp’s Bagger 288--which makes the task of deconstructing those mountains of data a whole lot simpler.
The Power7 processor is for server use. It has 1.2 billion transistors, and up to eight cores. Each core can run up to four threads simultaneously, allowing 32 parallel tasks. Each chip comes with 8GB of embedded DRAM per core, which eliminates the need for a separate L3 cache chip. Throughput is four times great than that of the Power6 chip. And, each system can be divided into as many as 1,000 virtual systems running multiple operating systems. (Sorry, Windows is not one of those operating systems.)
As you’d expect, this type of power doesn’t come cheap. An entry level Power 750 Express system costs in the neighborhood of $34,000. No word on what the top-of-the-line Power 780 system costs, but with eight 4.1GHz quad-core units, 2TB of DDR3 RAM, and 24 SSDs, it's pricing won't be for the faint-of-heart.
Image Credit: IBM
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JohnP
February 13, 2010 at 11:23am
The Itanium processor is used in a similar manner and indeed the heatsink looks a lot like the one I remember on the Intel/HP chip. These bad boys are for server farms and parallel processing tasks (none of which would do us any good).
LatiosXT
February 13, 2010 at 9:33am
Last I heard, you could only do generic number crunching on a GPU. I don't think you could virtualize an entire machine on a GPU.
So if you want to do number crunching, sure, you could get a GPU. If you want to host a bunch of clients, you're going to need one of these (or something equivalent).
QuakindudeMod
February 13, 2010 at 1:45am
I don't understand why when these companies need huge amounts of stream computing done, they aren't adapting Nvidia or ATI GPU's to the task. Surely it woul dbe cheaper to adapt these GPU's rather than building their own, specialized processors for it and the GPU would probably do a better job of it.
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QUINTIX256
February 12, 2010 at 8:48pm
I'll take a cypress instead. It has 2.154 billion transistors, and it pairs up quite nicely with a co-processor quite capable of running Windows.
Not to mention that one could be bought for as little as $400.
You can have your recession. I'm not participating.
RtDK
February 12, 2010 at 7:33pm
O.O
That's a lot of power. Just think! In ten years, that kind of processor will be commonplace in most home PC's ... only, y'know, it'd play nice with Windows. =P
leetNightshade
February 12, 2010 at 11:09pm
Hah, I think in ten years we'll be way past that. Intel is already releasing a consumer 6 core chip, capable of 12 processing threads. Intel has been doing research on a 48 core chip. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say we'll be beyond that in ten years based on the rate of CPU improvements.
Neufeldt2002
February 12, 2010 at 2:08pm
To bad it can't "run" Windows, imagine the fun one could have with it.
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Alperian
February 12, 2010 at 2:02pm
It reminds me of reading a similar article about the DEC Alpha workstation in 1992. I wonder what will be coming along in 2028.
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice Doggy' until you can find a rock.
van_helblaze
February 12, 2010 at 1:08pm
but can it play Crysis 2?
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Hmm, maybe we can convince the district to let us buy one of these to replace are current server.
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