IBM earlier this week lifted the wraps on its new Power7 systems designed for a range of applications, including smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial institutions, the company said.
The Power7-based servers have been optimized to chew through huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, analysis, and other related tasks. And according to IBM, customers can expect "dramatic improvements" in the price-to-performance ratios, as well as energy savings and server virtualization. More specifically, IBM claims its new systems can deliver four times the performance and four times the virtualization capability as its predecessor for the same price.
There are four new systems in all, including the IBM Power 750 Express for mid-market clients, IBM Power 755 with 32 Power7 cores, IBM Power 770 modular enterprise system with up to 64 Powe7 cores, and the IBM Power 780, "a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 Power7 cores."
Image Credit: IBM
Several chip makers are expected to talk up current and upcoming processor designs at this year’s International Solid State Circuits Conferences, but it’s Intel’s 48-core chip that might steal the show.
Not a whole lot is known about this mega-chip just yet, other than it’s an experimental 48-core processor called the Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCCC). We also know that each core is a full x86 implementation that can run its own OS instance, but other than that, we’ll have to wait for more details.
AMD will also be on hand to discuss an upcoming 32nm mobile processor, which could possibly end up being the company’s first "Fusion" processor, currently codenamed Llano. Or it could be AMD’s Bobcart architecture revealed last last year. Either way, AMD says the chip it plans to show off will be a 32nm implementation of an AMD x86-64 core with more than 35 million transistors (not counting L2 cache). It will run at frequencies above 3GHz and sport several power improvements.
More details here
.
Image Credit: Intel
The University of Illinois is about to become home to IBMs newest supercomputer, the Blue Waters. When it is finished in 2011, it will be the most powerful supercomputer allowing public access. With the aid of Big Blue’s new Power7 processors, the rig is expected to be capable of a staggering 16 petaflops. IBM did, however, clarify that initial peak performance is likely to be closer to 10 petaflops, with sustained real-world performance in the neighborhood of 1 petaflop.
IBM’s fears about overheating led them to develop a special water-cooling system for the whole rack, processor and all. This Power7 chip sounds like a nice way to play Crysis, right? You might be worried that this kind of power will be reserved just for wealthy governments and super villains. Well, luckily the Power7 will ship out in business servers sometime in 2010. Start saving those pennies.
Talk of the technology behind the PlayStation 3 console always turns to the Cell processor, an innovative chip architecture which, in the PS3, contains essentially 9 processors on single chip (one PowerPC chip and eight Synergistic Processing Elements, or SPEs). And up until now, there was no reason to believe Sony wouldn’t once again go with a Cell processor in its PlayStation 4 console, but there now lingers some doubt if the chip truly is "dead in the water, as David Turek, IBM’s VP of Deep Computing, supposedly said.
The quote comes from German webiste Heise Online, which goes on to claim that the planned successor to the current chip, which is slated to have two PowerPC processors and 32 SPEs, is no longer going to be released.
What exactly that means isn’t entirely clear at the moment. So far, there’s no evidence that IBM is halting development on Cell processors, only that the specifically planned successor has been canned. If we’re to take a glass half-full approach, that could mean the PS4 will utilize an even more power Cell processor, though it’s far to early to tell.
Image Credit: dlb-network.com
