Ahem....
So, TPM, whatever is happening, it's all IBM being clever and taking advantage of AMD's woes. Couldn't possibly be IBM slipping on delivery of a Power chip, because they never do that, no sirree, never!....
Big Blue is getting ready to do a bunch of enhancements on its Power Systems lineup either this week or perhaps next week, but don't expect any kickers to the current eight-core Power7 processors, which first made their debut in February 2010 and were rolled out through the summer of last year. That's because, contrary to what …
in the form of new POWER 770 and POWER 780 systems.
The new POWER 770 (which is the one that I normally use) will at
64 cores@3.3 GHz and 4TB of RAM doing 4,132 Watts at 100% utilization
versus the old one which will at
64 cores@3.1 GHz and 2TB of RAM doing 4,472 Watts at 100% utilization.
So 5% more oomph with x2 the amount of RAM using 8% less POWER.
Sure reminds me of the Jump from POWER5 to POWER5+.
// Jesper
Ok, fair enough, that is a decent improvement. I think it is wise to also focus on lowering power consumption, and not just performance. I did not even know the POWER7+ is already here.
Actually I personally bought my first IBM gear recently. An IBM M1015 disk controller card. It is cheap, and good. It is a rebranded LSI 2008 card that can be flashed with LSI 2008 BIOS to an LSI 9240-8i(?). Because it was IBM gear, I never hesitated to buy it. People might have opinions about IBM performance, but it is well known that IBM server gear is sturdy and of high quality. Risk free to buy IBM gear, you will not get crap.
Well, when I look around the home office.. it says HP printer, HP scanner, Philips screen, Toshiba laptop, hp calculator (I did use to study physics) .
And well I don't know if the new system's announced are actually POWER7+ (32nm), or just a 'we've gotten better at making POWER7' version of the chip I don't really know. *shrug*
Well the real change is the increase in RAM x2 for the POWER 770 is a real game changer for us, it basically means x2 the amount of load on the machine. So for RL performance this is good. Furthermore the announcements talk about increased IO bandwidth, I supposed that means that the P5IOC chips that only ran at GX+ speeds have been updated. That should give the machine x2 IO when only using the system units IO and 33% more when using IO drawers.
The POWER 780 now supposedly goes to 16 sockets, according to the IBM homepage, So basically this means that the machine has quite an unused potential of IO and memory bandwidth.
An option like the IBM has on the x3850 and x3690 with extra memory in an addon box would be great.
But with 16 sockets, the POWER 780 actually surpasses the M9000 with 64 sockets on the specint2006rate high score.
// jesper
To be quite frank, without the help of redpieces and redbooks, we would be lost trying to figure out how to design a solution.
The normal IBM websites are today to infested with marketing bullsh*t and fancy flash stuff that doesn't really help you. And to be honest, although they have greatly improved, the manuals do contain all to many circular references. And it can usually take som time to actually locate what you need. Much easier in the old days where there just were a PDF file that contained it all.
// Jesper
As far as I can see, all teh vendors seem to have rubbish webbies, and not exactly brilliant documentation. But I suspect that's to make sure you go on the vendor training courses, which all now cost a rediculous amount, and seem to have gone from being centers for customer education to merely profit-making machines.