Power 7+ was first introduced late last year on the enterprise class p770 and p780 servers with a new model designation of MMD. IBM has always offered a consistent roadmap, so just as before with Power 5 and Power 6 any new “plus chip” always offers a bump in performance with higher clock speeds. In this case up from 3.5 to 4.3 GHz. What is not immediately obvious, but just as significant, is a massive increase in L3 cache from 4MB on Power 7 to 10MB per core on Power 7+. The bigger cache means more of the data can be stored on the chip close to the CPU cores, which helps to speed-up operations significantly. Overall we are getting an average 25% increase in performance based on IBM published rPerf performance figures.
Unless you were looking at buying an IBM enterprise class power system at the end of 2012, this would have largely passed by unnoticed. That is until recently as IBM has started to roll out the new p7+ processor across its mid-range and entry-level power boxes.
The p750 was the first of the Power7 released in 2010 and was the platform used for Watson. For those of you who do not remember, Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of processing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data and was famously used to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy. This system gets a p7+ update that includes a much needed integrated split backplane and gen2 PCI slots. Dimensions wise it is also slightly larger now and comes in a 5U form factor from the previous 4U. The p760 is a new Power 7+ system that joins the range and is the smallest system in the enterprise range to support capacity upgrade on demand.
There are also new p710 and p730 express models giving you this enterprise class chip performance in a 2U entry level system footprint. It is also pretty clear that IBM sees x86 Linux systems as its main competition at this end of the power systems range by offering comparable pricing to level the playing field. Also, IBM is offering more competitive pricing on the p720 and p740 Power 7+ systems.
What is also significant with this increase in horsepower is that Power 7+ takes the PowerVM technology and moves it forwards with 20 LPARs per cores giving greater granularity for server consolidation.
It is always important to look at the required software versions when integrating new power models into an existing power estate. From an AIX perspective the IBM Power 7+ will require AIX V7.1 TL02: Service Pack 2 or later, AIX V6.1 TL08: Service Pack 2 or later or AIX V6.1 TL07: Service Pack 7 or later and a minimum HMC version of V7 R760 and VIO Server version 2.2.2.2.
You can find out more about the new Power 7+ servers or the comparable x86 pricing for Power 710 and Power 730 servers by contacting your Celerity Representive.
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