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* Posts by Gerard Cannon

2 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Intel drags feet on Itanium quad-core (again)

Gerard Cannon
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Tim, power chips have never slipped their timeline

Tim, you may want to run a few searches on IBM power releases. I've worked for IBM since 1997 and we have NEVER slipped our timeline on Power chip releases. Every 3.5 years we release a new chip like clockwork. I don't know where you got the info that power 7 doesn't have a release date either. As usual it is slated for its 3.5 year iteration which is end of 2010. Power 6+ wasn't meant to be a speed increase. It was meant to increase capacity of existing servers as it is a quad core design vs. a dual core design for power 6. This increased capacity of our 16 way system to 32. The speed bump was just a byproduct.

This is straight from wikipedia

POWER3

Main article: POWER3

IBM introduced the POWER3 processor in 1998. It implemented the 64-bit POWER instruction set, including all of the optional instructions of the ISA (at the time), and had two floating-point units, three fixed-point units, and two load-store units. All subsequent POWER processors implemented the full 64-bit PowerPC and POWER instruction sets, so that there were no longer any IBM processors that implemented only POWER or only POWER2.

[edit] POWER4

Main article: POWER4

IBM introduced the POWER4 processor, the first in the GIGA-Series, in 2001. Like the POWER3, it was a full 64-bit processor, implementing the full 64-bit PowerPC instruction set; it also had the AS/400 extensions, and was used in both RS/6000 and AS/400 systems, replacing both POWER3 and the RS64 processors. There was a new ISA release at this point called the PowerPC 2.00 ISA, which added a couple of extensions to the ISA, such as a version of mfcr which also took a field argument.

[edit] POWER5

Main article: POWER5

POWER5 MCM with four processors and four 36 MB external L3 cache modules.

IBM introduced the POWER5 processor in 2004. It is a dual-core processor with support for simultaneous multithreading with two threads, so it implements 4 logical processors. Using the Virtual Vector Architecture, several POWER5 processors can act together as a single vector processor. The POWER5 added more instructions to the ISA.

The POWER5+ added even more instructions, bringing the ISA to version 2.02.

[edit] POWER6

Main article: POWER6

POWER6 was announced on May 21, 2007. It adds VMX to the POWER series. It also introduces the second generation of IBM ViVA, ViVA-2, which is the biggest change to the POWER series of processor since the transition from POWER3 to POWER4. It is a dual-core design, reaching 5.0 GHz at 65 nm. It has very advanced interchip communication technology. Its power consumption is nearly the same as the preceding POWER5, whilst offering doubled performance.

[edit] POWER7

Main article: POWER7

Currently in development at IBM, POWER7 will be the first of the Peta-Series. It's projected for release around 2010 and has been selected by DARPA as a potential processor to be used in their Peta-FLOPS SuperComputer. In the early 2000s, IBM submitted their proposal and received $53 million from DARPA to continue to participate in the challenge; in 2006, IBM received $244 million to build a petaFLOPS computer for DARPA.

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IBM's Power6 slaughters world+HP in transaction cranking

Gerard Cannon

Herby you're WAY off base

Herby, making a statement like and I quote, "The price-performance will always be better on X86 architectures, due to the volume and thus pricing of these products. Moving to AIX/Power from HP_UX/Itanium is really like jumping from the fire into the frying pan." is like saying a Ferrari Enzo is a great buy because the tires are cheap. You're looking at one piece of the total cost of ownership--hardware. By the way, labor is the most expensive piece of any i/t shop, not hardware. So if you ask any third line manager or above if they'd rather spend big bucks on a big machine or save money on the hardware and have 3 more head count you can guess which one they'll pick.

Pricing of the hardware is not the only consideration in purchasing a solution. X86 architectures typically require a LOT more personnel to admin as they are usually many small boxes all with their own firmware, os's, and apps that need patching not to mention the complex software like RAC required to get them to move any significant amount of data. Did we get to software licensing yet? By the way, its by processor and yes it takes a lot of dumpy x86 procs to equal one RISC proc. Larger servers when looked at across a Total Cost of Ownership are MUCH less costly in the long run.

Not to mention you make no case for what type of availability the customer requires. I hope you're not expecting your 100 machine x86 cluster to have any type of uptime.

Herby, stick to macs and playing games on pc's. Your experience in the arena of business is obviously lacking or in a VERY small business.

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