Nekochan Net

What is known of the Power6 specs today?

Models?
Speed (MHz)
Benchmarks?
Double and single precision performance?
Features?
Cache?
2 cores?

didn't yet read the articles through, but:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6039293.html
is an interview with chief chip architect,
http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn020706-story01.html
is an article about the chip.

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Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.
-R. Buckminster Fuller

2 cores? lol, IBM's been doing multicore for years. Now Intel wants to make a huge deal and call their chip "Core" like they invented the concept.

Anyway, I saw that IBM had in the labs ran on of these with 6 cores at 6 ghz each.

Power6 is going to rock the cock. I've got Linux\PPC on a system at home, works rather well, so I think it'd be fun to make a Power6 workstation.

so we have:
4 to 5 GHz
13 stage pipeline
large on die L2 cache, not shared
on die L3 memory controller
more than 36MB L3cache
maybe L4 cache
750million transistors
dual-core

A Power-6 workstation would be fun, indeed.
quad Power6, quad 1GB Nvidia Quadro, 256GB FBdimm, Infiniband, SAS storage, Linux or AIX OS.

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Greetings from Germany

there were quite a few rumors about high ghz but i doubt the production version will run that high. anyway it doesn't matter what they have in the labs as long as it's not released.

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r-a-c.de

Well none of it's released. We're discussing a future product.

likewise, as i said.

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r-a-c.de

I remember initial estimates for the P4 going up to something like 10Ghz in their presentation slides, so it is very wise to take estimated operating speeds with a large grain of salt.

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Apple Unibody MBP 2.66Ghz, 8Gb OSX 10.6
Apple MacMini 1.83Ghz, 1Gb OSX 10.5
Apple Power Mac Cube 450Mhz, 256Mb, OSX 10.3 Sweet!
Sun Ultra10 440Mhz 1Gb, SunOS 5.10

http://gothmog.homeunix.net/blog

Whatever the case, I want one.

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Maverick 3: Athlon X2 7750, 2gb, Windows Vista
Frank Dux: SGI Octane2 R12k 400mhz 1.5gb

"Chief, look! I learned to make fire! Who knows what we could do with this... We should learn to control it!"

"Ridiculous. How can you justify wasting time and effort on this so-called 'fire' when our children are freezing to death at night?"

A p-iv ? I can get you one at a good price .....

Noooo, a P-VI.

I've got a Power4 "eMac" with Linux on it.

_________________
Maverick 3: Athlon X2 7750, 2gb, Windows Vista
Frank Dux: SGI Octane2 R12k 400mhz 1.5gb

"Chief, look! I learned to make fire! Who knows what we could do with this... We should learn to control it!"

"Ridiculous. How can you justify wasting time and effort on this so-called 'fire' when our children are freezing to death at night?"

It is confirmed that POWER6 has:
- Single-instruction-latency FXU
- Higher dispatch bandwith of 7 for SMT compared to Power5's 5.
- 64kb L1D cache (up from 32kb)
- 4MB private L2 cache per core (up from 1.9MB shared)
- Dual memory controllers (instead of 1).
- Pipeline depth of 13 (shorter than Power5's 15)
- Dual thread SMT, with the second thread providing ~40% extra performance for integer and 55% for OLTP benchmarks. (POWER5 was ~20-35%)
- IBM seems to be using different channel length transistors for different frequency points.
- Rumored: No more grouping of instructions
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/ind ... &roomid=11

Here is IBM's Presentation at FPF:
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/IBM ... Credie.pdf

And an abstract from next week's ISSCC:

"The POWER6TM microprocessor combines ultra-high frequency operation, aggressive power reduction, a highly scalable memory subsystem, and mainframe-like reliability, availability, and serviceability. The 341mm2 700M transistor dual-core microprocessor is fabricated in a 65nm SOI process with 10 levels of low-k copper interconnect. It operates at clock frequencies over 5GHz in high-performance applications, and consumes under 100W in power-sensitive applications."

We also know that Power6 will be used in Blade servers as well:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6141435.html

We will know more next week when IBM makes their presentation.

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My Systems:
Apple MacBookPro, 2.66Ghz Dual Core i7, Nvidia 330M GT, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD + 750GB (optibay)
AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz, Nvidia 9800GT, 8Gb RAM, 2TB + 1.5TB
Apple iBook G4, 1.2ghz G4, ATI 9200, 768MB RAM, 80GB.
HP c8000, 1.1Ghz Dual Core PA-8900, ATI FireGL X3, 6GB RAM, 2x73GB

Realworldtech had a good enough article about it awhile ago.
http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT101606194731

_________________
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better"

A bit more info here:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8823.html

Looks like they have exceeded 5Ghz and will be shipping in systems in ~4 months.

_________________
My Systems:
Apple MacBookPro, 2.66Ghz Dual Core i7, Nvidia 330M GT, 8GB RAM, 240GB SSD + 750GB (optibay)
AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz, Nvidia 9800GT, 8Gb RAM, 2TB + 1.5TB
Apple iBook G4, 1.2ghz G4, ATI 9200, 768MB RAM, 80GB.
HP c8000, 1.1Ghz Dual Core PA-8900, ATI FireGL X3, 6GB RAM, 2x73GB

Yeah, they had systems running stable at 6Ghz, they are using some weird process where they are inducing some germanium doping. Pretty kwel!

_________________
"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"