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IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz
The Register ^ | 11 July 2008 | Ashlee Vance

Posted on 07/14/2008 11:03:59 AM PDT by ShadowAce

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1 posted on 07/14/2008 11:03:59 AM PDT by ShadowAce
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To: rdb3; Calvinist_Dark_Lord; GodGunsandGuts; CyberCowboy777; Salo; Bobsat; JosephW; ...

2 posted on 07/14/2008 11:04:24 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: ShadowAce

Woo-hee!


3 posted on 07/14/2008 11:06:03 AM PDT by rawhide
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To: rawhide

Yeah—think of all the nuclear simulations we can do with one of these—not to mention Folding@Home!


4 posted on 07/14/2008 11:07:32 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: ShadowAce

Man, think about how many folding@home units a day that monster could crunch. :)


5 posted on 07/14/2008 11:08:42 AM PDT by kingu (Party for rent - conservative opinions not required.)
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To: ShadowAce
Sun Microsystems is already shipping (slower clocked) 64-thread, 8-core processors, that run relatively mainstream OSes like Solaris and Linux and OpenBSD.

What does IBM have? A promise to ship something (quantity and pricing unknown) two years from now...

6 posted on 07/14/2008 11:09:21 AM PDT by ikka
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To: ShadowAce

The scary thing is that in about 10 years your home PC will blow the doors off this machine.


7 posted on 07/14/2008 11:10:29 AM PDT by 2001convSVT ("People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence")
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To: ShadowAce

So, how fast is the disk I/O on the machine? I’ll be impressed when the disk I/O is as fast as the processors.


8 posted on 07/14/2008 11:11:47 AM PDT by isthisnickcool (OBAMA IS AN ARAB! _NEENER_NEENER!)
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To: ShadowAce
Microsoft just found its miniumum requirements for the next version of Windows.
9 posted on 07/14/2008 11:14:26 AM PDT by KarlInOhio (Whale oil: the renewable biofuel for the 21st century.)
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To: isthisnickcool
I imagine the RAIDs are tuned pretty well. I know I've seen 4GB/s now (between servers) using IB, which is quite a bit slower than the 1.3PB/s interconnects mentioned in the article.

Which those interconnects, tuning of massive RAID arrays, and fast discs, I can see some massive I/O speeds on this puppy.

10 posted on 07/14/2008 11:16:05 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: KarlInOhio

Right, but it will take a Tb of ram to keep that version from bogging down.


11 posted on 07/14/2008 11:17:26 AM PDT by Sgt_Schultze
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To: ShadowAce
I was forced to buy a new desktop for the home, and although there is nothing wrong with a dual core machine with an out of the box 2 ghz, whose mother board can accept a quad core processor,
if you can, wait until the new motherboard architecture is out, because these "old" 775 socket type boards are going to be obsolete. That way you should get a good 8 years (or more with upgrades)of use out of it before the next generation of computer comes along rather than buying one that is already obsolete.
12 posted on 07/14/2008 11:19:36 AM PDT by Nathan Zachary
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To: Sgt_Schultze
Right, but it will take a Tb of ram to keep that version from bogging down.

What are you talking about? This system has 620TB of RAM--that'll be the new minimum... :)

13 posted on 07/14/2008 11:20:01 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: ShadowAce

Wow. But I still won’t upgrade until service pack 1 is released. ;-)


14 posted on 07/14/2008 11:23:46 AM PDT by Sgt_Schultze
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To: ShadowAce

for sheer gigaflops, I’d say Obama’s running a close second.


15 posted on 07/14/2008 11:25:17 AM PDT by the invisib1e hand (maybe apes evolved from people.)
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To: ShadowAce
Cool! I'll take two of 'em.


16 posted on 07/14/2008 11:29:22 AM PDT by rdb3 (Upward, onward, beyond...)
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To: ShadowAce

100 racks isn’t actually all that much, just 10x10 racks. If you wanted to, you could squeeze them into an area the size of a small house (about 70x24 feet) and still have room to walk around. I’ve seen bigger datacenters, but of course nothing with even close to this much power.


17 posted on 07/14/2008 11:32:00 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: the invisib1e hand

ROFL!


18 posted on 07/14/2008 11:33:52 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach (No Burkas for my Grandaughters!)
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To: antiRepublicrat
100 racks isn’t actually all that much,...

It's a pretty good size for a single machine. Granted, for an entire datacenter, it's not that big.

But this is designed to be a single machine.

19 posted on 07/14/2008 11:35:32 AM PDT by ShadowAce (Linux -- The Ultimate Windows Service Pack)
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To: ikka
Sun Microsystems is already shipping (slower clocked) 64-thread, 8-core processors, that run relatively mainstream OSes like Solaris and Linux and OpenBSD.

It was an open bid for a future high-speed system, and IBM won it. It's not about what's available now, it's about what can be installed in 2010, and that is slated to have over three times the clock speed as the UltraSPARC T2. It looks like what Sun has now and the upcoming IBM will have about the same density, although the IBM system will be doing half the number of systems (1 2U IBM = 2 1U Sun).

I am wondering about how the architecture approaches will compare. The Sun has 8 cores on a chip, 8 threads each. The IBM separates it out a bit, 8 cores per chip, 4 threads each, two chips per module.

20 posted on 07/14/2008 11:57:54 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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