StarDestroyer.Net BBS

ArsTechnica has a good overview, but for you lazy folk ...

• Top frequency of 4.7GHz
• >790 million transistors
• 341mm2 die size
• 65nm SOI process with ten layers of copper interconnect and a low-k dielectric on the first eight levels
• Dual-core
• Two-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT) on each core
• Two memory controllers

For the 16-core configuration, that's 32-way multithreading. Single-core SPEC2006 scores are 21.6 (int) and 22.3 (fp) ... pretty much crushing everything else on the market.

Sounds fun, however, forgive my ignorance, but who is using Power cores nowdays? Not that this isn't a very nice chip(I want one), but will it exist outside the HPC market?

Just goes to show that IBM still has plenty of life left in its processor design teams. I wonder if they will share some of their design secrets with AMD though, at least on the production side.

Ace Pace wrote:Sounds fun, however, forgive my ignorance, but who is using Power cores nowdays? Not that this isn't a very nice chip(I want one), but will it exist outside the HPC market?

Mainframe, AIX and HPC people are about all that'll use this.

So. How much would one of these babies cost? To buy that is.

General Zod wrote:So. How much would one of these babies cost? To buy that is.

Probably $20-30K for the base model. You then need another few thousand for the OS and support contracts.