IBM shows off Power7 HPC monster

Kebabbert

Too powerhungry. Legacy techniques

tom 99

"Kebabbert, you need to educate a bit more before posting such a mess." ....I have double Masters, one in math and one in comp sci, algo theory. What is your education?

"Clock frequency has little in common with CPU performance in this case. Single Power7 core is faster than single Power6 core, because P7 has out of order processing." ...Wow, isnt it what I have been saying all the time?! That Clock frequency has little to do with performance! But stupid IBM frantically claims that clock frequency is everything, and that 1.4GHz Niagara is slow compared to 4.7GHz Power6. OTOH SUN claims that clock speed has nothing to do with performance, and for that they get bashed by IBM, all the time. I am glad that you and me share the same point of view on this, and that IBM are wrong when they equate clock speed with performance. A counter proof is Niagara.

"Other assumptions of yours are wrong as well. Reading Sun whitepapers is not good enough." ... As far I can tell, nothing in your post holds for closer scrutiny. I am most probably more educated than you. And we both agree that clock speed does not equal performance, contrary to what IBM states. So what do you mean with "other assumptions are wrong as well"? Nothing is wrong in my post. Could elaborate a bit more, instead of FUDing?

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Anonysmous Coward, 30Nov 04:52

"Kebabbert, you haven't shown anything. You just repeat hyperbole from others. Why don't you come back with 2009 numbers. No one cares about z990 vs pentium 4 from 2003 anymore." ...What have I not shown? I can post this link again from year 2003, just for you

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-390@vm.marist.edu/msg18587.html

Here we see that an Linux expert thinks that Mainframe 1MIPS equals 4MHz x86. So 1000MIPS equals 4GHz x86, according to him. If he lies, please point out his lies.

Regarding "updated numbers", yes I totally agree with you. As I had said earlier, I expect a fast Nehalem to be compete with any Mainframe CPU. We see that 1MIPS == 4MHz x86. That is for Pentium 4, which is dog slow. Now, core2duo and Nehalem is much more efficient clock for clock. I expect a 2GHz Nehalem to totally crush a P4@2GHz. One 1MHz x86 has changed a lot since year 2003. One MHz is maybe 5-10 faster, today.

OTOH, the IBM MIPS hasnt changed at all. 1MIPS from year 2003, compares to 1MIPS today. Mainframe CPUs are faster today. Instead of 10.000MIPS, they maybe do 50.000MIPS today. But it is the same metric.

This means that the numbers from year 2003, "1MIPS == 4MHz" must be modified. One MHz is 5-10 faster today, let us be generous to IBM and say only 4 times faster. Then the new numbers will be "1MIPS == 1MHz". As the coming Nehalem with 8 cores at 3GHz will correspond to 8 cores x 3GHz = 24GHz we see that it corresponds to 24.000Mips. Get a quad socket mobo, and you will have 4 such Nehalems giving the equivalent of 96.000Mips. How much does a Mainframe giving 100.000MIPS cost? 10 Million USD? Compare that to a quad socket Nehalem PC. Maybe 5.000 USD? Buy a couple of those PC and you have good redundancy too.

So I totally agree with you. Those numbers need to be updated to show the new x86 CPUs. They are many times faster than the old P4.

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Lastly, power7 sucks if you look at how much work it does per watt. Legacy constructions are like that: high Hz, small cache. Even the legacy constructed Fujitsu SPARC Venus is twice as efficient than a Power7. With all IBMs resources, they couldnt do anything better than this. Just like Microsoft: Windows sucks. Catastrophic.

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