IBM sharpens Power7 blades
Twice the oomph. For less
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IBM seems to finally be getting serious about Power-based blade servers. Today's launch of the Power Systems 701 and 702 blades, which use the new eight-core Power7 chips, offer about twice the performance of their predecessors, the JS23 and JS43 machines that were delivered using dual-core Power6+ chips last April. The use the same snap-together design of the JS23 and JS43 machines, but have half the processor sockets and lower prices too.
The relatively low prices for the PS701 and PS702 blades are intended to push back against the impressive bang for the buck that the just-announced Xeon 5600 and 7500 processors from Intel and the Opteron 6100s from Advanced Micro Devices are offering in entry rack and blade servers. The price/performance of the PS701 and PS702 blades also presages the forthcoming Power 720 announcement, very likely to be a two-socket server using Power7 chips coming from IBM later this year.
And IBM could also put out a very aggressively priced single-socket entry box aimed at small and medium businesses with fairly fixed and modest workloads, akin to the Smart Cube appliances that IBM has been selling as a kind of modern-day AS/400 in India and then the United States. (Yes, the Smart Cubes were introduced to those two geographies in that order, and they are not available elsewhere yet). With half-dud Power7 chips being a dime a dozen, IBM will try to remove as many from the scrap heap as possible and put them to good use.
The PS701 blade is a single-socket blade server, unlike the two-socket JS23 blade server it replaces in the Power Systems lineup and more like the JS12 blade that IBM introduced in April 2008 with a dual-core Power6 chip. Back then, IBM had a two-socket blade, the JS22, and that was it in terms of scalability. But in April 2009, IBM took a page out of its Opteron server playbook and created a two-socket blade server that had built-in SMP ports across the HyperTransport bus, so two two-socket blades could be snapped together to create a double-wide blade with twice the sockets (and cores) and twice the main memory.
Such a double-wide blade was called the JS43 with the Power6+ lineup, and with the Power7 machines, the double-wide is called the PS702. IBM's new HX5 blades, based on Intel's "Nehalem-EX" Xeon 7500s, also have this double-wide architecture for SMP expansion, but it is obviously based on a different chipset than the one used in the Power Systems machines.
With the PS701 blade, IBM is keeping it simple. There is one processor SKU at this time: an eight-core Power7 running at 3 GHz. That's it. The blade has sixteen DDR3 memory slots, topping out at 128 GB using 8 GB memory sticks (the fattest ones that Big Blue supports at the moment on Power7 iron). The PS701 blade has a slot for a single 2.5-inch disk drive, which is a SAS unit with either 300 GB or 600 GB capacity. The PS701 blade has a dual-port Gigabit Ethernet controller, a SAS disk controller, a service processor, two USB ports and two PCI-Express mezzanine cards for connection to external storage or networks.
Next page: Mommy blade meets daddy blade
COMMENTS
Boxer is a swedish TV company and they are also to expensive..
Cool it Keb.
As for what is fair game to compare with regards to systems.
IMHO If you are shipping (and it is not a legacy product), or have announced priced/benchmarks etc of a product/system Then it is fair game to compare against it.
And what do I mean with a legacy product, well IMHO it wouldn't be fair to compare Nehalem-EX, Westmere -EP, POWER7 based products to for example the SUN Netra T2000, which is still a product you can buy from Oracle. Then there is the T5120, that wouldn't really be fair either. You could argue that on price/performance it might be fair but otherwise no.
But it is IMHO fair game to compare with T2+ products, and your insistence on comparing with a product (T3) which isn't here and to which we only have very little information is not serious.
And you have NO WHAT SO EVER, problem with comparing to T2+ products when it suits you, like the SUN T5440 cluster TPC-C benchmark. sooo..
Now, comparing against legacy products and mismatched systems, that is what the FUD machines of the Big Server Vendors do. Cherry pick, trying to find weaknesses etc etc. That is why you should always check the context of a comparison on a vendor site. And this goes for all vendors, that is why I constantly say to you that when you pick case studies, or link to comparisons on vendor sites, that this is not the way to do it.
I have no problems with vendor sites that list their own benchmarks, no problem, but when they start to compare and glorify their own products I say no. And cause you have in the past mainly picked from sources like, I use the terms cherrypicked by SUN or the like. If you had done the same from an IBM or HP site I would have used just the same terms.
Don't blame it on me that you can't tell marketing from
But comparing against T2+ systems against current x86 systems and POWER and Itanium is totally fair. You on the other hand with your hand waving about T3, and that it's another generation than the T2+, and that it is only fair to compare equal generations .. bla bla..
T2+, SPARC64 VII, Nehalem-EX, Westmere-EP, Itanium Montvale, Tukwila POWER7/POWER6 are shipping products. And fair Game.
Sure when we start to get benchmarks on T3 then it's also fair enough to compare with that. But we haven't yet. And with the whole ROCK history of SUN then I only think it's fair that we get some semi hard facts on the table before you start to go into a religious frenzy of worship.
I mean it's just like hearing the people who really like Itanium, who are already preaching Poulson.. I mean come on, Tukwila isn't even shipping yet.
And for your whole compare "POWER6 to Nelahem EP and claiming that POWER6 CHIP is faster than Nehalem EP." I'd like to have a link to where I've said that.
It seems to me you often forget that things are different seen in different contexts.
For example which CPU is the fastest Database platform ?
Well it sure depends on the database, Neither T2+ or POWER will run SQL server. So it will be a match between Itanium and x86.
Which CPU is the fastest ?
It depends. Is that seen in the context of a fully loaded Enterprise class system ?
Or is it in a cheap whitebox 1-2 socket server ?
Or Or ...
For me it is quite simple, I need both single threaded throughput, Core throughput and scalability, cause that is what I we need where I work.
And that is the basis for my look upon the world...
// Jesper
Kebabbert
"And how about your statements that "despite you need four POWER6 to match two Intel (ordinary) Nehalem, the POWER6 is faster"
The Power6 is generally faster than Nehalem - per core, which is what most software vendors base their charging on. If you are talking per chip, then a 4 core Nehalem is faster than a 2 core Power6 chip.
And don't get sucked into generation this and generation that. If the chips are available in the general timeframe, then they should be compared against each other. I have no idea when T3 will be shipping - if it is within this year, then it will be compared against the POWER7 later in the year, if not, then it might have to go against the POWER7+ next year.
Jesper Frimann
"...Statements like the above only gets you put in the same box as Kebbabert..."
Oh, is it so? And how about your statements that "despite you need four POWER6 to match two Intel (ordinary) Nehalem, the POWER6 is faster"? Or, when you claimed that because Niagara T2+ had an Hz upgrade from 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz it could be considered a new generation CPU, playing in the same league as Nehalem-EX, POWER7, Niagara T3, Venus, etc? I claimed that POWER6 and Niagara are in the same generation, and POWER7 and T3 are next gen - you said: No.
These above are just some of the weird comments you have spewed out. I have many many more weird comments from you. I, OTOH, always asks for proofs, and links to benchmarks and white papers when I claim something - you OTOH always rejected my benchmarks as ("cherrypicked by Sun", "Carefully crafted by Sun", and what not). I have always accepted your benchmarks. The best thing is, when recently, you claimed that "I have changed and now supplies benchmarks and white papers to my claims" - that is pure bull shit from you. That is only an attempt from you to make look like I am an FUDer coming with unsubstantiated claims.
I have talked lots about mathematicians being taught to supply proofs, and to ask for proofs. Always. As a mathematician I do that. You are just FUDing again, but, now about me. I also asked for proofs from you: prove it, show that I am not able to backup my claims. You have never supplied such a proof. FUDing again. Just like the rest of IBMers.
So, these remarks put you in box of your own.
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