IBM Unveils New Power7 Systems for the Smarter Planet

by Darryl K. Taft

A finished 300mm Power7 processor wafer ready for testing.

IBM Test Engineer Michael Kulikowski with Power7 Ceramic Module. The Power7 is aimed at new workloads such as advanced financial modeling and finding cures for diseases such as cancer.

IBM Test Engineer Sara Lestage holds a 300mm Power7 processor wafer next to a wafer test tool.

Power7 chips are manufactured on round 300mm wafers, roughly the size of a small pizza, then diced into individual processors.

The IBM Power7 family of systems includes four new models: the Power 780, Power 770, Power 755 and Power 750.

IBM Power 770, a midrange system with up to 64 Power7 cores, featuring higher performance per core than Power processors and using up to 70 percent less energy for the same number of cores as the IBM Power 570.

IBM Power 750 Express, an Energy Star qualified business server for midmarket clients offering four times the processing capacity of its predecessor, the IBM Power 550 Express in the same energy envelope.

Power7 ceramic module with a lid is shown here bottom side facing up. Each Power7 processor contains eight cores, with four threads per core.

Chandler Wilkerson, Linux Server Architect at Rice University, checks on one of the new IBM Power7 systems being used at the school for a variety of health-care projects, including cancer research.

IBM Power 780, a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 Power7 “cores,” or CPUs, and the new TurboCore workload optimizing mode. TurboCore can deliver up to two-times the performance per core of Power6 processor-based systems providing excellent ROI for applications with high per-core performance requirements, such as managing and analyzing transactions from a smart electrical grid.

IBM Power 755, a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores, Energy Star qualified for energy efficiency, and optimized for challenging analytic workloads.