IBM Power7 hot topic at Hot Chips conference
The Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif this week is focusing on high-end chips for servers and scientific computers, with IBM's upcoming Power7 as a standout.
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On Tuesday, IBM will give a presentation on its next-generation server chip, the Power7. IBM documentation describes the chip as having up to eight cores. A dual-chip module holds two processors for a total of 16 cores, according to IBM.
Each core has a rated performance of 32 gigaflops, providing 256 gigaflops per processor--one of the fastest chips to date based on this scientific-centric performance benchmark.
Power7 will be used in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications "Blue Waters" supercomputer, the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications, according to the NCSA. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
Power7 "will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM. The design includes extensive research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments," according to the NCSA.
Other chips to be described at the conference include the Sparc64 VIIIfx: Fujitsu's new 8-core processor for Peta scale computing. Sun will discuss its "next-generation multi-threaded processor Rainbow Falls" and AMD will spell out its Magny Cours processor, 12-core chip.
Intel will present a paper on its upcoming Nehalem server processor.
Intel will also discuss Moorestown, an upcoming version of the Atom processor targeted at mobile Internet devices and smartphones. Intel will also give a presentation entitled "Understanding the Intel Next Generation Microarchitectures (Nehalem and Westmere) transitioning into the Mainstream."
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Unfortunately, it seems like the computer will be quickly becoming obsolete, which I think may be a problem for Apple in the long run, as they will become beholden to Intel for their computer chips. Microsoft's push to make Silverlight 3 the streaming video standard (was not able to watch March Madness on Demand this year) and Adobe's decision to build universality into CS5 mean updates will be tough to come by...... Apple seems to have a good relationship with Intel, despite some occassional press sparing, what with the work on the Air's processor and development of motherboards - but with the moves with Nvidia on videocards, and the increased hostility on low powered chips (Apple's ARM-derived chips verses Atom) having another option may help with Apple's leverage
Article doesn't discuss power consumption.
Apple made a good move switching to intel, it made their OS more flexible, and it would be even more flexible and competitive if they opened it up to run on non apple branded hardware, legitimately.
Realistically, as long as you don't care if you dominate the OS market the way Apple is doing it is just fine. Protect your brand and your customers for the most part will be highly satisfied. I have seen too many good companies go bad all because they wanted to dominate their market segment. Anyway, just my opinion. :-)
They should throw one of these babies in the PS4 :-P
- by scott-lawrie November 2, 2009 5:06 AM PST
- IBM_TIMI, This leaves me wondering as RedHat is supported on Power Systems could you run RedHat's KVM and run a windows partition on top of that? Thereby running a windows Server on a Power system...Just speculating
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