IBM's Power7 server hits the shops

THE PURVEYOR OF BLUE IRON and grey tin boxes, IBM has released its latest Power7 line.

In a move which aims beat up Sun and send HP dashing for cover, IBM says that its integrated Power7 servers, software and storage will start selling this month.

The Power7 servers are based around Biggish Blue's Power chip architecture with key technology in separate Cell processors. The Cell programme, which was part of IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, forms the backbone of the Power7 core. Custom-made for specific uses, they are designed for big jobs such as running electrical grids or financial analytics.

Oracle is beginning to sell similar servers after buying Sun and claims it has IBM targeted by selling computers packaged with software customised for industries such as retailing.

Global sales of high-end servers will be about $14 billion this year, it is said. IBM held 40 per cent of that market in the third quarter while HP had 27 percent and Sun 26 percent.

Power7 systems can process more data than its predecessor the Power6 and deliver twice the performance and four times the virtualisation capabilities for the same price as the Power6 servers, all while consuming half the energy.

The Power7 processor chip offers up to eight cores, with each core able to run up to four instruction threads, enabling each chip to run 32 simultaneous tasks. It has four times the number of cores and eight times the number of threads per chip than the Power6.

No word on prices yet, but we suspect that, although it is supposed to cheaper than what HP and Sun are offering at the moment, it's still the case that if you have to ask the price you can't afford it. µ