IBM doubles Power cores

Well, the rumor going around that IBM is doubling up the processor core counts on its Power Systems servers turns out to be true. Today, IBM announced that it has doubled up the cores in the Power 570 to a maximum of 32, and it's now offering a 16-core box called the Power 560 that slides in underneath it in the product line. …

[Jesper Frimann]

A few errors in this article.

First I wouldn't compare the chipset of the x3950 to the power 570 and power 560. The power servers do not have a external chipset in the same sense as the x3950 do.

Try to have a look at this redbook that deals with the big brother of the power 570 the power 595:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4440.html?Open

Furthermore the new 4.2GHz power 570 with a maximum of 32 Cores is a 4 CEC (building block) system, hence each CEC have 2 CPU boards which each has 2 'sockets', giving it a total of 8 cores per building block.

The only problem I see with these new systems (power 560 and power 570) is that they have can house less memory than the power 550 and the 16 core power 570 per core.

I do think that the power 560 have been overdue for some time. But it is a nice upgrade from the p560Q which could house 16 1.8GHz power5+ cores and only 128GB of RAM.

// Jesper

[Rob McCleave]

Yeah But

Can I run PPC Leopard on this thing?

[Mark Robertson]

Hmm, I wonder...

Just curious to how Mac OS X would perform on this system? ;)

[Jesper Frimann]

Nopes

Well we won't know. And isn't this like comparing a hummer to a AEGIS Cruiser ?

But This guy did manage to get a very important windows program running on one of these boxes:

http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/systems/power/community/aix/AIX_Movies/PowerVM_Lx86.wmv

Just fun.