The first architectural point is the growing import
First, some context. Power7 is a single-chip, eight-core cluster of processors. This is quite a leap from previous generations of the Power architecture, in which the largest number of CPU cores on a die was two. The chip is designed to fit into an extended coherent array of processors, scalable up to 32 sockets, or 256 CPUs in a single hardware-coherency fabric. This contrasts with PC or workstation CPUs intended only for much smaller coherency networks. This fundamental difference shows up in all aspects of the chip design.
IBM's description of the Power7 CPU chip at Hot Chips Wednesday raised three interesting architectural points. None of these is directly important to the commercial microprocessor market, because IBM designed the Power7 chip primarily for use in its own supercomputing server designs. But all three points illustrate architectural issues that will in the future concern the broader computing and embedded communities.
By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor
IBM Power7 architecture illustrates some issues for the rest of us
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IBM Power7 architecture illustrates some issues for the rest of us
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