4 ms·
Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3
- alttab 17y agoI've been an application developer for AIX and Power7 for almost 2 years, and I'd say the grind rate is pretty impressive. Developing for power is a bit of a bitch, and the hardware is expensive but it is certainly an impressive slice of engineering.
- akamaka 17y agoI'm curious if anyone knows why chips like these are being used today. If you already have software that parallelizes to 16 cores, why not just use a few more x86 cores and save a lot of money?
- patrickgzill 17y agoPart of it is software licensing that charges per-socket or per-core. For Sun they do have certain applications in mind that are very parallel, such as web serving and message routing, where memory latency can serve to slow things down; the idea of hardware threads is to keep the CPU busy in spite of waiting for a fetch from main RAM.
- oiuyhgnjm 17y agoIt's a lot easier to share a database across 128 threads on a single machine with uniform memory than shard it across 64 dual core machines with gigabit ethernet.
- jrockway 17y agoWow, 16 cores on one die. 128 threads. I can't wait until this makes it into consumer-level hardware. (I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but "build it and they will come".)
- pavlov 17y agoNo need to wait -- you can already buy a GPU with that kind of specs, and program it with CUDA or OpenCL.