Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 17th Oct 2006 22:20 UTC
At the MicroProcessor Forum, Dr. Brad McCredie of IBM continued to tease out particulars regarding the POWER6. The presentation discussed a lot of general microarchitecture features, but did not reveal many specific details; a full revelation of the microarchitecture will likely have to wait till ISSCC, next February. However, from the details that were revealed, it is clear that the POWER6 inherited many characteristics from its predecessors, yet made substantial improvements in others.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Benchmarks are only part of the picture: Alpha had very good benchmarks most of the time, it's still dead.
What were missing to x86 against PPC/Itanium is:
- high end RAS (Reliability Availability Supervision) features, x86 is getting more and more these features.
- bullet proof OS: if Linux isn't enough for some, Solaris is good enough for most.
One problem remaining with current x86s is the memory: FB memory has power problem and will be dumped, so getting box with many GB of RAM can be a problem (well FB works, but do you want to use a deadend solution).. But replacement is coming.