Power7 chips going for a song in Big Blue January sale

Power Systems, the line of big iron packing Power7 CPUs, was one of the bright spots in IBM's server business in the fourth quarter - so a price cut on Power7 processor cards and processor core activations might be one of the last things you would expect out of Big Blue. But this week, that is precisely what the company did. …

[Peter Gathercole]

We've still not seen Power7+ announced

so it may be that this is making space for upcoming higher-performance systems within existing products, and doing it early to try to maximise the amount of the existing systems sold before any announcement.

[King1Con]

Maybe there is is a POWER7+?

Could be that IBM are clearing out the inventory now. 6 Months Late is better than nothing.

Every SPARC T processor has been on-time, some projected to be early. I guess POWER advocates will say that a particular SPARC processor from a particular vendor was never released 6 or 12 years ago, but POWER7+ being late for 6 months today is a real thorn in POWER's side today - especially since IBM is the sole server chip provider and customers have no other options, unlike the security SPARC customers had with multiple vendors over the years.

A beer for the upcoming POWER7+! Cheers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe there is is a POWER7+? → #

There will be a Power 7+ mid year, like clock work. Power 4 - 2001, Power 5 - 2004, Power 6 - 2007, Power 7 - 2010... see the pattern. The clock speed kicker comes 24 months into the cycle.

Yes, SPARC T is killing it. When Rock comes out, look out world. I just hope those Sun Microsystems guys give the poor Power guys a chance. I mean, come on, Power only has 55% of the RISC market. I think Sun Microsystems is going to acquire Oracle.

[cmaurand]

iSeries, too

the iSeries machines are also based on Power7 chips.