

Two billion-transistor beasts: POWER7 and Niagara 3 - ssp
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/two-billion-transistor-beasts-power7-and-niagara-3.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

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alttab
I'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.

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akamaka
I'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?

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patrickgzill
Part 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.

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jrockway
Wow, 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".)

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pavlov
No need to wait -- you can already buy a GPU with that kind of specs, and
program it with CUDA or OpenCL.

