IBM has previewed the designs for its upcoming 64-bit Power 5 processor, which the company states will augment total system performance by 40 percent over its predecessor. At last week’s Hot Chips Conference in Palo Alto, Calif., IBM disclosed that it was incorporating simultaneous multi-threading into Power 5; the process takes chip multiprocessing to a new level where each chip tackles two threads as opposed to one.
IBM Charges Forward with Power 5
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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and soon the G6 980
i bet linux will scream on an ibm power 5 system…. will the power users go for this instead of an opteron? choice is good!
I wish I could go into my local computer store and buy this kind of hardware
I wish IBM would push Linux on their new PowerPC chips toward consumers, and try to get consumer software companies onboard. I the 970s and 980s(or whatever the scaled down Power 5 will be called) could be the next Pentiums as far as becoming the dominant platform.
intel already has HT on pentium 4’s. Would like to see benchmarks comparing it to p4’s
I don’t want to only get it from Apple or whatever, so is there any chance we will get the motherboards from the different companies such as MSI, Abit, ASUS, Tyan and etc?
Opteron is not even in the same league as the Power5, I guess you were mistaking Power5 with G5 or the 970?
How will companies like Oracle charge for licensing per a processor on hyper threading systems?
The Power 5 is like an Itanium 2 without the over complicated design. Although I haven’t seen any benchmarks of the Power 5, I know the Itanium 2 has the potential to beat the Opteron at almost 2x for fp calculations.
Personally I’d much rather have the Opteron, being the best bang for the buck. I can wait for that kind of CPU power. My Athlon 2000+ MP system can crunch video at 30 fps. Good enough for me for now.
Intel should heed the wake up call and provide 64-bit Itanium processors for the desktop market. Oh, yeah, and trash the x86 architecture. EPIC is in town now. 😕
Mystilleef
“will augment total system performance by 40 percent over its predecessor.”
Several press releases has stated that figure is 4x or 400 percent its predecessor. Eugenia, are you sure you got that right?
Heh… I should have RTFA…
I was right the first time… Its 400%
http://www.computerwire.com/cgnews/149219F9D742848D88256CD400019D8C…
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984808.html“>Power5
Links… unscrambled
IBM Confirms 4X Performance Boost For Power5 Servers
http://www.computerwire.com/cgnews/149219F9D742848D88256CD400019D8C
Power5 to quadruple server brawn
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-984808.html
intel already has HT on pentium 4’s. Would like to see benchmarks comparing it to p4’s
recent benchmarks have shown HT slows down a p4 on certain tests (FP, i believe is most affected). also, i believe the g5 is a dual core, so hopefully it will not have the same bottleneck.
The G5 is a single core CPU, where as the POWER 5 is an
dual core design. Secondly the POWER 5 switches the SMT on and
off depanding which “mode” gives the most preformance.
And last of all, that 40% speed increase is due to IBM’s
implementation of SMT, it is not the total speed increase.
The P4 is deep and narrow; it only has about 5 execution paths and can issue 3 instructions per cycle. Under HT Intel only has 1 execution thread; the 2nd thread waits until the 1st one gets to a stall point (a conditional branch), at which point the processor switches to the 2nd thread to avoid misguessing which path to take.
The POWER5 is deep and wide; it can issue 4 instructions per cycle to about 8 paths (they wanted to make sure they had enough redundancy to be able to issue all 4 instructions each cycle). Because they have so many paths, IBM’s SMT runs the 2nd thread with the 1st thread; i.e. the 2nd tread is allowed to use any paths not used by the 1st thread.
The only benchmarks I’ve seen are comparing the I2 and the POWER4 doing SQL hosting. The results don’t look too good for the I2; a 32-way POWER4 system matches up closely to a 64-way I2. Assuming this is a good test, then the POWER4 is 2x faster then the I2 and the POWER5 should be 8x faster then the I2.
I just want to know when IBM will start to offer this chip at the retail level with supporting motherboards.
Then I can buy this and standard components at newegg and throw Linux/FreeBSD on it. This would kick a$$.
IBM has the oppurtunity here to give Intel a run for the money now that we have opensource OS’s and not the Wintel juggernaut.
I don’t know if FreeBSD will support Power5, yet… Maybe, later but I don’t see any developement for Power5 at the moment.
Can you just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
Sorry, couldn’t resist.