POWER7
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POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 20101 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochester, MN; Austin, TX; Essex Junction, VT; T. J. Watson Research Center, NY; Bromont, QC and IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, Böblingen, Germany laboratories. IBM announced servers based on POWER7 on 8 February 2010.
POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochester, MN; Austin, TX; Essex Junction, VT; T. J. Watson Research Center, NY; Bromont, QC and IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, Böblingen, Germany laboratories. IBM announced servers based on POWER7 on 8 February 2010. 4 64-bit SIMD units per core, and a 128-bit SIMD VMX unit per core, can do 12 Multiply-Adds per cycle, giving 24 SP FP ops per cycle. At 4.14 GHz, that gives 4.14 billion * 24 = 99.36 SP GFLOPS, and at 8 cores, 794.88 SP GFLOPS. Peak double precision (DP) performance is roughly half of peak SP performance. For comparison, Intel's 2013 Haswell architecture CPUs can do 16 DP FLOPs or 32 SP FLOPs per cycle (8/16 DP/SP fused multiply-add spread across 2× 256-bit AVX2 FP vector units). At 3.4 GHz (i7-4770) this translates into 108.8 SP GFLOPS per core and 435.2 SP GFLOPS peak performance across the 4-core chip, giving roughly similar levels of performance per core, without taking into account the effects or benefits of Intel's Turbo Boost technology. This theoretical peak performance comparison holds in practice too, with the POWER7 and the i7-4770 obtaining similar scores in the SPEC CPU2006 floating point benchmarks (single-threaded): 71.5 for POWER7 versus 74.0 for i7-4770. Notice that the POWER7 chip significantly outperformed (2×–5×) the i7 in some benchmarks (bwaves, cactusADM, lbm) while also being significantly slower (2x-3x) in most others. This is indicative of major architectural differences between the two chips / mainboards / memory systems etc.: they were designed with different workloads in mind. However, overall, in a very broad sense, one can say that the floating-point performance of the POWER7 is similar to that of the Haswell i7. IBM POWER7 Technology and Systems - IBM Journal of Research and Development (published by IEEE Xplore) IBM Won DARPA HPCS Phase-III IBM Won DARPA HPCS Phase-II IBM Has Its PERCS POWER 780 SPECint_rate_base2006 result IBM BladeCenter PS703 and PS704 Technical Overview and Introduction
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