back to article IBM preps boost for Power Systems

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 …

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  1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Facepalm

    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!....

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    if only iBM sold as advertised web price for a base 710/720 system 5852.00 & 6835.00 US running IBM i give them a call and the price automatically jumps to three times the list price with things you don't even need.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My guess is that what may become Power8 is being reconsidered, and they are delaying Power7+ so that the gap between 7+ and 8 is not too large.

  4. Goat Jam
    Angel

    Hmmm

    What about Power7S ?

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Happy

      RE: Hmmm

      Shirley, Power7G?

      Besides, The Cult of Jobs will sue, they have the patent on any names starting with an "i", or ending with a "G" or an "S", seeing as they designed their G and S first, and all other Gs and Ss with curves are obviously copies.....

  5. Kebabbert

    Interesting

    to see what POWER7+ is up to. The POWER7 is a very good cpu, everyone agrees on this. The POWER7+ must be even better! Very exciting for us tech nerds! :o)

    Go IBM! This forces Oracle and Intel to be better, which makes us all happy! :o)

    1. Jesper Frimann
      Thumb Up

      Actually it's already here (I guess) .....

      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

      1. Kebabbert

        @Jesper Frimann

        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.

        1. Jesper Frimann
          Terminator

          Gear.

          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

          1. Allison Park
            Thumb Up

            awesome

            Thanks for the quick summary, you can never get those from IBM announcements its either press releases that make you blurry eyed or 170 page powerpoints.

            1. Jesper Frimann
              Gimp

              Yes.

              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

              1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
                Unhappy

                RE: Yes.

                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.

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