I know that many of you have been upgrading from older technology to POWER6 servers. As one customer recently told me, "The machine is working great. Performance is better than I expected." That seems to be a constant theme: people are happy with the newer hardware when they get it deployed.
Still, I'm sure that many others have been delaying their upgrades. They figure that POWER7 will be here soon enough, so why not just put that upgrade on hold for a while?
As I noted, IBM recently issued a statement of direction that I consider to be good news for these customers. If you've been debating whether to order a POWER6 server now or wait until POWER7 comes out, you can have the best of both: POWER6 performance now, and POWER7 when it ships.
From IBM:
"IBM plans to provide an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 595 server with 12X I/O to IBM's next-generation POWER7 processor-based high-end server. The upgrade is planned as a simple replacement of the processor books and two system controllers with new POWER7 components, within the existing system frame. IBM also plans to provide an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 570 server with 12X I/O to IBM's next generation POWER7 processor-based modular enterprise server."
More details are emerging about POWER7 processors.
"'POWER7 is an 8-core, high performance server chip. A solid chip is a good start. But to win the race, you need a balanced system. POWER7 enables that balance...' Starke noted that the POWER7 offered 'multiple optimization points,' such as improved energy efficiency, upgraded thread performance, dynamic allocation of resources and an 'extreme' increase in socket throughput. In addition, the POWER7 provides scalability up to 32 sockets, 32MB on chip eDRAM shared L3, dual DDR3 memory controllers, 100GB/s memory bandwidth per chip (sustained), 360GB/s SMP bandwidth/chip and 256KB L2 per core.
Also:
"Basically, the POWER7 is an 8-, 6, and 4-core chip with 1.2 billion transistors, running at an undisclosed clock speed. A shared L3 cache of up to 32 Mbytes in size will use eDRAM. The POWER7 will scale up to 32 sockets and 1,024 threads. Not surprisingly, it will be backward-compatible with the POWER6.
"Not surprisingly, the performance of the POWER7 exceeds the POWER6 by a significant amount, although IBM has left off actual numerical comparisons. Application comparisons such as integer workloads seem to indicate an improvement of about 20 percent across the board on a per-core basis, and a 4X to 5X performance when compared chip to chip."
Hardware constantly evolves, and every organization needs to evaluate the tradeoffs when comparing performance to the costs of acquisition and running new machines. Keeping up on all of the benefits of POWER6 and POWER7 compared to older technology that you might be running today can be a challenge. However, by creating an upgrade path that allows your organization to migrate when the time is right, IBM has made it easier to protect your investment.
Still, I'm sure that many others have been delaying their upgrades. They figure that POWER7 will be here soon enough, so why not just put that upgrade on hold for a while?
As I noted, IBM recently issued a statement of direction that I consider to be good news for these customers. If you've been debating whether to order a POWER6 server now or wait until POWER7 comes out, you can have the best of both: POWER6 performance now, and POWER7 when it ships.
From IBM:
"IBM plans to provide an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 595 server with 12X I/O to IBM's next-generation POWER7 processor-based high-end server. The upgrade is planned as a simple replacement of the processor books and two system controllers with new POWER7 components, within the existing system frame. IBM also plans to provide an upgrade path from the current IBM Power 570 server with 12X I/O to IBM's next generation POWER7 processor-based modular enterprise server."
More details are emerging about POWER7 processors.
"'POWER7 is an 8-core, high performance server chip. A solid chip is a good start. But to win the race, you need a balanced system. POWER7 enables that balance...' Starke noted that the POWER7 offered 'multiple optimization points,' such as improved energy efficiency, upgraded thread performance, dynamic allocation of resources and an 'extreme' increase in socket throughput. In addition, the POWER7 provides scalability up to 32 sockets, 32MB on chip eDRAM shared L3, dual DDR3 memory controllers, 100GB/s memory bandwidth per chip (sustained), 360GB/s SMP bandwidth/chip and 256KB L2 per core.
Also:
"Basically, the POWER7 is an 8-, 6, and 4-core chip with 1.2 billion transistors, running at an undisclosed clock speed. A shared L3 cache of up to 32 Mbytes in size will use eDRAM. The POWER7 will scale up to 32 sockets and 1,024 threads. Not surprisingly, it will be backward-compatible with the POWER6.
"Not surprisingly, the performance of the POWER7 exceeds the POWER6 by a significant amount, although IBM has left off actual numerical comparisons. Application comparisons such as integer workloads seem to indicate an improvement of about 20 percent across the board on a per-core basis, and a 4X to 5X performance when compared chip to chip."
Hardware constantly evolves, and every organization needs to evaluate the tradeoffs when comparing performance to the costs of acquisition and running new machines. Keeping up on all of the benefits of POWER6 and POWER7 compared to older technology that you might be running today can be a challenge. However, by creating an upgrade path that allows your organization to migrate when the time is right, IBM has made it easier to protect your investment.
I hope the POWER7 gets the POWER chip series back on track. We have been very disappointed in POWER6 and saw no real performance gains after upgrading from POWER5+. This is the first time that we went from one generation to another and did not at least double our performance. This was more like a side-grade. We did some benchmarking with a 4.2GHz POWER6 quad core against POWER5+, an x3850, and even a Core i7 desktop and the POWER6 CPU (which should have left all of these in the dust) was only marginally better performing and was slower in many areas (single and multi-threaded). The only time it performed as expected was compiling the benchmark programs that tested floating point math using the IBM xlC compiler with the -pwr6 and -O5 flags. Without that, it was completely lackluster. It looks like they cranked the clock speed up to 4.2 GHz and then made every instruction take 2 clock cycles to complete.
This is the first time I have been disappointed by IBM with respect to p-Series/System p/whatever (just go back to calling them RS/6000 - everyone knew what the heck you meant then). I hope it is the last, too, because the platform overall is very stable, someone who knows how to design a server and make it easy to maintain when you do have to do something to it has gotten hold of these boxes and really made them nice, it just seems that whatever green crap they tried to force on everyone with this processor series ended up producing an inferior performing product (just like anything else labeled as "green" seems to be).
If we had been able to get a demo before we bought/leased our last equipment, I doubt we would have moved to the POWER6 servers and just stayed on POWER5+ as it did everything we need and would have been much cheaper for very nearly the same performance.
Posted by: -=Eclypse=- | October 22, 2009 at 01:42 PM
IMHO. Performance aside, Live Partition Mobility on POWER6 was worth the upgrade effort to p6.
Posted by: CG | October 25, 2009 at 08:22 PM