IBM on Monday unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. The company said the new product line is designed to manage the most demanding emerging applications, including high-capacity smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial markets.
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The servers are optimized for processing huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, and analysis. IBM said they offer dramatic improvements in price versus performance, energy savings, and server virtualization.
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Energy Efficiency
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The new systems are built around the newest generation of IBM’s POWER chip, with eight processing cores, and are designed to manage millions of transactions in real time while utilizing a variety of approaches to remain highly energy-efficient. With Intelligent Energy technology, for instance, parts of the system can be turned on or off, and clock speed can be lowered or raised, on one server or a group. The company said these systems can deliver twice the performance per watt as Sun SPARC servers and eight times that of comparable Hewlett-Packard Itanium-based servers.
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POWER7 systems are optimized for massive parallel processing, high-end throughput, and analytics, and the systems can be used to manage others, such as IBM mainframes and x86-based servers.
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Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Information Technology Intelligence Corp., said these turbocharged systems should really jumpstart multi-threading computing. She added that each of the eight cores can execute up to four tasks each, so it’s as if this were a virtual 32-core processor on a chip.
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This capacity is four times the maximum number of cores in POWER6 systems and eight times the processing threads.
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Smart Energy Grids
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DiDio noted that these systems will enable a huge performance boost in the growing market of smart energy grids, allowing utility companies to go from a million meter reads a day to 85 million. In its announcement, IBM noted…