POWER7
POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+.[2][3] IBM won a $244 million DARPA contract in November 2006 to develop a petascale supercomputer architecture before the end of 2010 in the HPCS project.[4] One feature that IBM and DARPA collaborated on is modifying the addressing and page table hardware to support global shared memory space for POWER7 clusters.[5] The POWER7 superscalar multi-core architecture was a substantial evolution from the POWER6 design, focusing more on power efficiency through multiple cores and simultaneous multithreading (SMT).[7] IBM stated at ISCA 29[8] that peak performance was achieved by high frequency designs with 10–20 FO4 delays per pipeline stage at the cost of power efficiency."[11] The new IBM Power 780 scalable, high-end servers featuring the new TurboCore workload optimizing mode and delivering up to double performance per core of POWER6 based systems.This theoretical peak performance comparison holds in practice too, with the POWER7 and the i7-4770 obtaining similar scores in the SPEC CPU2006 floating point benchmarks (single-threaded): 71.5[17] for POWER7 versus 74.0[18] for i7-4770.
clock rateTechnology nodeInstruction setPower ISAPOWER6POWER8PowerPCQorivvaPOWER1POWER2POWER3POWER4POWER5POWER9Power10RAD6000RAD750RAD5500BroadwayEspressoPWRficientOpenPOWER FoundationAIM allianceBlue GenePower.orgAltiVecsuperscalarmulti-coremicroprocessorsinstruction set architectureRochester, MNEssex Junction, VTT. J. Watson Research CenterBromont, QCBöblingenpetascalesupercomputerGeneral Parallel File Systemsimultaneous multithreadingdual-corepipelinemicroarchitecturetransistorsquad-chip modulethreadssingle precisiondouble precisionHaswellfused multiply-addTurbo Boostfloating pointIBM Power SystemsBladeCentersWatsonIBM Power microprocessorsYouTubeEE TimesInformation WeekArs TechnicaNational Center for Supercomputing ApplicationsAnandtechThe Register