Edit: The statement of direction is no longer working. The POWER7 link no longer works.
Originally posted October 20, 2009 on AIXchange
I know that many of you have been upgrading from older technology to POWER6 servers. As one customer recently told me, “The machine is working great. Performance is better than I expected.” That seems to be a constant theme: people are happy with the newer hardware when they get it deployed.
Still, I’m sure that many others have been delaying their upgrades. They figure that POWER7 will be here soon enough, so why not just put that upgrade on hold for a while?
As I noted, IBM recently issued a statement of direction that I consider to be good news for these customers. If you’ve been debating whether to order a POWER6 server now or wait until POWER7 comes out, you can have the best of both: POWER6 performance now, and POWER7 when it ships.
From IBM:
“IBM plans to provide an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 595 server with 12X I/O to IBM’s next-generation POWER7 processor-based high-end server. The upgrade is planned as a simple replacement of the processor books and two system controllers with new POWER7 components, within the existing system frame. IBM also plans to provide an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 570 server with 12X I/O to IBM’s next generation POWER7 processor-based modular enterprise server.”
More details are emerging about POWER7 processors.
“‘POWER7 is an 8-core, high performance server chip. A solid chip is a good start. But to win the race, you need a balanced system. POWER7 enables that balance…’ Starke noted that the POWER7 offered ‘multiple optimization points,’ such as improved energy efficiency, upgraded thread performance, dynamic allocation of resources and an ‘extreme’ increase in socket throughput. In addition, the POWER7 provides scalability up to 32 sockets, 32MB on chip eDRAM shared L3, dual DDR3 memory controllers, 100GB/s memory bandwidth per chip (sustained), 360GB/s SMP bandwidth/chip and 256KB L2 per core.
Also:
“Basically, the POWER7 is an 8-, 6, and 4-core chip with 1.2 billion transistors, running at an undisclosed clock speed. A shared L3 cache of up to 32 Mbytes in size will use eDRAM. The POWER7 will scale up to 32 sockets and 1,024 threads. Not surprisingly, it will be backward-compatible with the POWER6.
“Not surprisingly, the performance of the POWER7 exceeds the POWER6 by a significant amount, although IBM has left off actual numerical comparisons. Application comparisons such as integer workloads seem to indicate an improvement of about 20 percent across the board on a per-core basis, and a 4X to 5X performance when compared chip to chip.”
Hardware constantly evolves, and every organization needs to evaluate the tradeoffs when comparing performance to the costs of acquisition and running new machines. Keeping up on all of the benefits of POWER6 and POWER7 compared to older technology that you might be running today can be a challenge. However, by creating an upgrade path that allows your organization to migrate when the time is right, IBM has made it easier to protect your investment.