IBM has also included a CAPI port so third-party components are easier to connect
IBM for the first time revealed details on Monday of its 12-core
Power8 chip, which is twice as fast as the Power7 chip used in the
Watson supercomputer.
To make the chip faster, IBM has turned to a
more advanced manufacturing process, increased the clock speed and
added more cache memory, but perhaps the biggest change heralded by the
Power8 cannot be found in the specifications.
After years of restricting Power processors to its servers, IBM is
throwing open the gates and will be licensing Power8 to third-party chip
and component makers.
IBM has moved away from some proprietary
board-level technologies with Power8, and has included a connector so
third-party graphics processors and other components can be easily
linked to the chip.IBM recently announced it would open up the Power
chip intellectual property and license it to third parties including
Google. The IP is being opened up as part of a development alliance
called OpenPower Consortium, and one of the members is Nvidia, which is
expected to develop a graphics processor that connects to the Power8
processor. Tyan is building a server based on the Power8 chip.
The
previous Power7 chip was perhaps best known for its place in the Watson
supercomputer, which famously competed against humans on the U.S. TV
quiz show "Jeopardy" -- and won.
Watson also found use in areas
like health care and the financial sector. Beyond IBM's traditional
market of Unix servers, the Power8 chip is also designed for areas like
cloud and big data."Big data is something that is driving
[performance]," said Jeff Stuecheli, chief nest architect of IBM Power
Systems in the Systems and Technology Development Group. "You have big
data, you need big performance."The Power8 chip will support up to 1TB
of DRAM in initial server configurations and will offer 230GB per second
of sustained memory bandwidth, Stuecheli said.
The external
components will be connected via the CAPI (Coherence Attach Processor
Interface) port. The CAPI port interfaces with the PCI-Express slot for
external components such as GPUs or FPGAs (field programmable gate
arrays) to communicate with the chip.The chip is made using the
22-nanometer process. Power8 has a large cache memory, including 512KB
of cache per core, 96MB of on-chip shared L3 and 128MB off-chip L4
cache. The L4 cache was removed in Power7, but it comes back with
Power8. Each processor core will also support eight threads, giving the
chip the ability to run 96 threads simultaneously.IBM wants to share the
Power8 technology with a larger ecosystem, and is also working on an
open software stack for the processor, Steucheli said. A lot of the
tools will help develop high-performance applications.
Stuecheli declined to say when the Power8 chip would be released.
By: Agam Shah
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