And we make calculators

IBM remains one of the most innovative companies in the IT industry, despite the fact that by general standards it has long been a gray-haired old man, pointing the way to young competitors. But it is unlikely that any other corporation would be able to gather within its walls the same amount of knowledge and its actual equivalent - patents, like International Business Machines. Of the nearly 6,000 inventions, about 70% of the mass is accounted for by developments in the field of software and services, which we are trying to improve and modernize every day.

However, the division of the company engaged in processors and servers Power has not been forgotten - in fact, it remains one of the most fruitful activities of IBM and in 2010 alone, engineers registered more than 100 patents related to the central processors and the logic of their work . $ 6 billion is invested in this area (Research & Development) annually - it is definitely interesting to see what such funds are spent on and what product is obtained in the end.


The main merit of IBM innovations in the field of microprocessors should be given to the founding father of the RISC architecture - John Cock. It is thanks to his intelligence that IBM-compatible architecture became the main standard in the industry decades ago, and his legacy allows the company to remain at the forefront of technological progress.

The RISC architecture, and indeed the entire industry, has come a long way from circuits on paper and machines the size of a room to ultracompact “computer on chip” solutions, and processors using a shorter instruction set are used everywhere: in smartphones, game consoles, and workstations. If we talk specifically about the line IBM Power, then six generations, replacing one another from the nineties, brought the Power 7 chip to a high level of reliability.
')
The differences in requirements imposed by the server’s customers (if computers of that time can be attributed to this category at all) in the days of Kok and today, after dozens of years, are enormous. IBM likes to compare the purchase of a workstation or data center equipment with the choice of a car: the buyer is interested in whether it will start in bad weather and whether it will start at all (fault tolerance), how many people will fit into it (scalability), how much fuel is required (energy efficiency), acceleration to 100 km / h (performance), not to mention the image component. Therefore, most buyers of serious technology: both computer and automotive, reflect on the same categories and are looking for, in a sense, the golden mean.



IBM Power 7 of the latest model is the optimal solution that the technical directors of young companies are looking for to equip their data centers, power the clouds and many other solutions: 4, 6 or 8 cores per socket; performance from 2.4 to 4.14 Ghz; 4 threads per core; eDRAM L3 cache; Dynamic power optimization - all of this is designed to satisfy any consumer needs in any system, from initial configuration to high-end workstations or high-load servers.

By the way, 32 Mb L3 cache is one of the most interesting innovations in the Power 7 model. Firstly, it is a high-density eDRAM memory (three times higher packing density than SRAM), which is characterized by low power consumption (in operating modes the gap x5 from SRAM), lower latency (x6 compared to off-chip memory), and more bandwidth (x2 compared to off-chip memory). All this leads to the fact that the Power 7 cache makes 250 times fewer errors compared to competitors and previous processor models.

The Power line also has the “Turbo Core” mode of operation that changes the flow of processes inside the chip: only 4 cores remain working, which receive the entire third-level cache (i.e., the memory per core is doubled, which leads to performance gains in computing at the level of 17-22%), and the core clock frequency rises. In this mode, the processor is able to process a large number of instructions in a short period of time, after which it will return to normal mode. Together with the turbo mode, the adaptive energy optimization system works, which means that sharp jumps in performance will not critically affect the consumption of all systems of electricity - this quality will be appreciated by engineers working with high-level and fault-tolerant infrastructures.

In all, Power 7 remains a good solution, optimized for specific tasks - you yourself can evaluate the range of equipment provided to customers on the IBM Power website. Here and entry-level servers, equipment for cloud providers and their complete opposite - super modern data processing cabinets, remotely resembling a Watson supercomputer, running, by the way, on the same processors.

All the positive qualities and distinctive features of the Power line will be reflected in the next, eighth generation processor. In addition to the reduced production process (up to the fashionable 22 nm.) And the computer-on-a-chip system of the next generation, it will be possible to find the embedded cache of a larger volume than now, and, of course, more productive and fault-tolerant cores.