IBM slips Power6+ into racks, blades

As part of a Dynamic Infrastructure hardware, software, and services announcement blitz today, IBM announced that it has put its Power6+ processor into entry and midrange Power Systems rack servers while delivering a more scalable Power6+ blade server that resembles the clever design Big Blue has used for several years on …

[Cesar Maciel]

Minor Corrections

Very nice article, but there are a few incorrect details, as follows:

1 - The Power 520 and 550 have had 2.5" SFF SAS disks for a while, and SSD disks have just been announced, as shown in http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/520/specs.html

2 - The Power 595 has the same 32MB L3 cache per POWER6 chip as the smaller systems, as shown in http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/595/specs.html . What's different between the smaller systems and the 595 is that the 32MB L3 cache on the lower systems is a single 32MB DRAM chip, while on the 595 it is split into two 16MB DRAM chips. That doubles the number of buses used for L3 cache I/O, therefore doubling bandwidth, as described in http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/516/le.html

Regards

Cesar

[Anonymous Coward]

Large L3 Cache = good

Performance testing the old JS22 I was amazed at the lack of performance - it did not do that well against a 1.9Ghz Power5 based server that had a big L3 cache (less than twice as fast when the core is double in GHz and over 4x in raw power). But the workload under test was very cache sensitive.... I'll be glad to see the larger L3 cache for the new blades especially as ppl are using these for java app server loads that need the cache.