Introduction to Power 770 + and 780 + systems IBM new Power7 + (1)

If you are a loyal reader of this site, you will surely think that IBM will launch the Power system server product online high-end product Power7 + processor, the minimum number is here and the company can extract more money from each chip on the product line. As before, you guessed it again. If you happen to be purchasing Power 770 or Power 780, stop and take a good look at the new Power 770 + and Power 780 + released last Wednesday.

I have explained this in my questions last week. I don't remember the last time IBM added a new processor to the Power system or the previous AS/400 or RS/6000 series, it takes a long time to upgrade the entire product line. The Power7 + generation will be normal, and it will perform a "rolling" upgrade to the product line instead of an abnormal upgrade from the Big Bang. It turns out that Power7 + will only be added to two small batch products in comparison, and this will be the case this year. So now, rolling mines are all outside the 9th cloud.

"Other products will join Power7 + next year, except Power 795". Steve hibury, marketing manager of the IBM Power System universe, explained to me before the release, this happens to coincide with the OpenWorld policy of John Fuller, senior vice president of Oracle hardware, and Oracle has not released 16-core HPC T5 processors and corresponding systems. "Like Power 595, we have put the fastest processor and I/O in it," he explained.

That is to say, I think some Power 795 stores may want to achieve higher extra performance than the existing L3 cache of Power7 + chips, such as 10 MB for each core, 4 MB for Power7, and several accelerators. Of course, this idea depends on whether IBM can provide 4 GHz or 4.25 GHz Power7 + to match the current clock speed. However, it is clear that Power 795 users cannot see such updates before the Power8 chip is released. This was a long time ago, but now it is happening again. It seems that IBM has few competitors in the field of large hosts. Fujitsu's iSCSI Enterprise M8000 and M9000 are resold by Oracle and run Solaris, with a 64-slot 3 GHz Sparc64-VII + chip working a bit old. The same is true for HP's assembly of the Superdome 2 with 32 slots of anteng 9300s. Fujitsu is preparing a 16-core Sparc64-X that will appear in the 64-socket server named Athena (but no one knows when it will work ), the Superdome 2 model is expected to be upgraded to the eight-core "Poulson" anteng 9500 s by the end of the year.

Therefore, in the announcement of October 3, IBM did not feel that it was necessary to put Power 795s into it. That is to say, the company has shelved 4 Gigabit memory chips and cooperated with its memory card supplier to provide a larger 1.07 GB memory card with a 64 GB DDR3 memory module with a running speed of GHz. With this memory, the current memory of Power 795 has increased to 16 TB. If you are an AIX seller and use the system software's "active memory expansion" memory compression algorithm, you can make the operating system and logical partition recognize it as 32 TB.

The existing Power 795 model uses PowerVM 2.2.2. Each core can drive up to 20 logical partitions. The original PowerVM version and earlier versions support 10 logical partitions per core. The PowerVM hypervisor can reduce the demand for a logical partition to 5% of the CPU's core processing capacity, but for some reason the system still reaches the limit when there are only 1000 logical partitions, instead of the 256 logical partitions you expect on the 5120 core system. With 32 TB of compressed memory, a host can allocate GB of virtual memory to a logical partition, this is sufficient for the cloud that provides IBM I And AIX capabilities to practical users. The problem is that each slice won't have too many CPUs. A single chassis is about 300 CPW and runs IBM I. That's all theory. The reality is that Power 770 + and Power 780 + servers.

Figure Power 770 + NO-rack housing

These new machines look like the power7' released by IBM a year ago. At that time, I felt that IBM was going to put the Power7 + chips into these machines, including the improved Power 710,720,730 and 740 systems, the memory doubles and the PCI-Express 2.0 peripheral slot is changed, as is true for Power 770 and 780. (These chassis are called power7' in the IBM demo ')

I have read about this release in some documents. These latest models are called Power 770 + and Power 780 +. I also need to stick to this term.

The Power 770 + is a four-piece model that uses a US-made chipset and uses a NUMA (non-consistent Storage Access) cluster, multiple server nodes can be linked to a shared storage system. We have seen this architecture in the Power5 era on IBM enterprise-level machines. This method of manufacturing machines is simpler and cheaper than manufacturing machines larger than Power 595 or Power 795. The latter two have more cores, memory, more input and output investment is used for real large-scale computing. Known as 9117-MMD in the IBM directory, Power 770 + each chassis has two processor cards. Like last year's Power 770 'model, each processor card has two processor slots. Therefore, each machine has four slots and there are up to 16 slots on a single system. Another way is to classify the number of slots as half of Power 795, which is the same as Power 595.

If you think you need to get started properly, but the scaling is fast, then Power 770,770 'or 770 + is the best choice for you. For example, you are an SAP seller in China. Or you have 1000 SAP stores in China. And so on.

Power 770 + does not use eight-core Power7 + chips, so the scalability of machines may not be as high as you think. In fact, it is probably because IBM's 32nm process used to etching Power7 + chips is not that high in production (or perhaps because these chips were not available last year ), IBM is wise (just like all chip manufacturers) to recycle some defective products and separate the chips with errors. In this way, IBM has configured three cores 4.2GHz or four cores 770 GHz on the Power7 + chip for the Power 3.8 + processor, with each core configured with only 10 MB of Level 3 caching.

With 32 GB memory, the master memory of Power 770 + can be increased to 4 TB, the same as Power 770, I think using 64 GB memory on Power 770 + can also be doubled to 8 TB, or half of Power 795, if IBM wants to do so. But it cannot be used when it is stuck on Power 770 +, Because IBM needs to give consumers a reason to buy Power 780 + or upgrade Power 795 memory.

Use IBM's commercial performance load (CPW) benchmark to measure the relative performance of the OS/400 and IBM I server families, A four-core 4.2 GHz processor with a Power 770 + rating of 90000 CPW, about 7500 CPW per core. This Power7 + chip with a four-core operating speed of 3.8 GHz is rated as 110000 CPW, about 6875 CPW per core. When you add processors to these systems, increase the number of cores to 48 or 64, symmetric Multi-processing and non-consistent storage access consume a large portion of the overall original performance to maintain memory and cache consistency, just as they occur on any other multi-plug-in server. The 48-core Power 770 + (306,600 GHz three-core chip) score is 379,300 CPW, And the 64-core (4-core chip at GHz) score is CPW.

As I said before, with the IBM I store, you can always get the fastest core in a variety of chassis, because the software you pay for depends on the running core, not the overall performance of the chassis. In addition, the IBM I store often has a lot of batch processing work, which is essentially a single chip. The higher the clock frequency, the better. (If IBM has a low-speed 3 GHz Power7 + chip and all core 80 Mb third-level caches are fully open, I think this configuration is really helpful for batch processing because of caching. But IBM doesn't, so it doesn't matter .)