
IBM's 5.0GHz Power6 processor - kirubakaran
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/08/ibm_595_water/
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Prrometheus
No price? I'm looking for an extra Linux system to develop on.

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wmf
[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/browse_linu...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/browse_linux.html)

~$5,500 per core. The blade is cheaper but you'd have to buy a chassis.

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keating
This is kind of pointless without commensurate memory bandwidth. Those CPUs
are just going to be waiting around doing nothing.

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wmf
That's why Power6 has enormous memory bandwidth (~50 GB/s theoretical).

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keating
The theoretical processor bandwidth is one thing; the actual throughput on
motherboards with existing slow memory chips (DDR2-667 according to the specs
page) is quite a different matter.

This becomes a pretty big deal when you have that many cores all hammering on
it at once. Divide by 32...

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wmf
Sure, so maybe in reality you only get ~30 GB/s/socket, which is 15 GB/s/core.
That's a lot more bandwidth than other systems have.

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keating
Unfortunately the limit is going to be in the chipsets for that DDR2-667 RAM.
PC2 5300 -- that is not a wide bus, 5.3 GB/s. That's the bottleneck.

