Wow, If only I had the money to purchase either one of those for my web server. Let us see how these chips play out though, specs arent everything. BTW my site is, www.wiseserpent.com/tech , little bit of free advertising heh..

I don't think the Intel chips are glue-less scalability. The IBM/NCSA Blue Waters project can perhaps scale up to 65536 processor chips or 524288 cores (if they have more money).

How would macosx 10.6 would perform on POWER7? Unless Apple have a POWER7 system in their secretive labs, we would never know. But you can run some benchmarks between a mac and a POWER7 system. And not just some specmarks or linpack benchmarks. Run a real application such as a web server, java app, database app, KDE desktop, etc..

Nehalem EX platforms are 1000 watts.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=987

Ouch!

High utilization of all processors and associated support chips will be critical for making this an energy efficient platform. Today, even with virtualization, platform utilization remains low at 25% to 35%.

Rack heat/power density is going to be an issue.

I wonder how the Power 7 chip would have performed on Snow Leopard if Apple would have stayed with that chip.

How much physical memory can you (architecturally) get on each of the chip families? IE ignoring number of slots on the motherboard, just based on the architecture and the number of pins (or equivalent) on the chipset?

For each of Power7, Nehalem, AMD's latest, and the latest Itanium?

Maximum physical memory is still important to some people. Not many, but to them if a system can't have the physical memory they need, it just isn't a player, so long as someone else's system *does* offer that amount of memory.

That's one reason Itanium is still around. Once that selling point goes away...

That's a bit arbitrary not counting the Niagara. Admittedly the T1 shared one FP unit, but the T2 had separate FP units per core (and, indeed, two integer processors per core).

Whatever others might think, the Niagara is most certainly a general purpose 8 core processor albeit one with relatively poor single thread performance. It's not suitable where single thread performance matters, but it's most certainly a general purpose CPU.

Sorry that is wrong. Nehalem won't be gluelessly scalable to thousands of sockets as you claim. That's totally ridiculous. Firstly, the hop count of such a simply connected system will grow significantly, and links will become saturated quickly past tens of sockets. Secondly, in glueless form it supports a broadcast snoop cache coherency protocol which does not scale past tens of sockets either.

I remember the days before AMD made a stir. Back when you'd pay $600 for a Pentium 200 with MMX instructions. That was in 1998 dollars. Then AMD scared Intel into submission with its glory days of the first generation Athlons. $250 for highest-end desktop processors. That was great.

But AMD and ATI can never lead, not for long. The two companies always squander their gains and it wasn't a surprised that their combined value was less than the sum of the parts. Now AMD can only barely compete at the low-end and we're stuck with paying $200 for Intel motherboards because of Intel's notorious licensing costs.

I do wish AMD would become a viable contender, but I'm not going to be the one to bankroll it. Having your flagship processor barely comparable to low-end few-year-old processors is not encouraging. I wish you luck AMD and I want you to do well, but I won't buy from you until you get your act together.

My dear Intel sucker...oh I am sorry lover.

No wonder you are Intel fan. Don't be stupid and brain less. How can you imagine this world without AMD today? You should give every due credit to AMD for keeping Intel in their bay. Else Intel would charge 1000$ for stupid P4...

you are a true loser wake up and think just how much you would be paying if intel dominated the market, as for pc's I jumped off the upgrade wagon years ago, my next upgrade will be a console (ps3 Slim)these days I only own an old sepmpron 2600+ socket A, but I know that when I do upgrade it won't be intel
c'mon guys how many of you really only use your computers for games, anyway upgrading just to play a game seems a waste of time, thats why I'm buying a console they have heaps more titles!

No you win the prize for the most stupid least thought through commend of the month.

If you don't like AMD then JUST BUY INTEL, and thank AMD for the fact you can buy an intel cpu for a 5th of the price it would cost when intel would not have a competitor. Without AMD I bet you would be able to buy a brand new just released 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 now for the sweet price of 1000$.

No competition no incentive to innovate and milk the crowd for all its money.

I hope your acne clears with age when you become 18.... In other words grow up and grow a brain to think with...

Intel doesn't compete with IBM per se. In fact IBM will be launching its own Nehalem-EX systems! Intel is a building block company and I guess AMD is as well. That means IBM can use both Power7, Nehalem-EX and AMD's Magny-Cour for different purposes and markets. The fact that these 3 cpu's fits into completely different price brackets makes it a no-brainer.

I guess POWER7 is more for things like supercomputers that crunch numbers for scientific computing. Things like meteorological, geological, particle physics, molecular dynamics, physical simulations, and other various hard science applications. All these applications have very proprietary software running, not some standard commercial package that anyone can get. I question the usefulness of generic benchmarks on a processor like this.

Perhaps a few insane wealthy gamers will look for a Nehalem EX, but that'll only be due to single core performance rather than multitasking ability.

As it is, no games use more than about three cores, and the majority manage with two. Unless they start implementing real time raytracing games, it's no use.

Of course, for visualisation and modeling it's a completely different situation. The fact that it'll be possible to get a 16 core machine off the shelf will be incredible.

No amd = $1000 for a cpu...

I read somewhere that the Power 7 is a 250 W power consuming monster - while the Nehalem - EX will be consuming much lower than that.