IBM this week completed its rollout of servers based on its POWER7 processor with four new entry level servers as well as a new high-end system. IBM first announced systems featuring the POWER7 processor in February of this year when mid-range servers and blades were released. The high-end Power 795 was to some extent expected, but the low end announcements contained a few surprises.
The chart above shows the current crop of POWER6 based servers vs. the POWER7 systems. The products are plotted by Availability Date (horizontal axis) vs. performance (vertical axis). Performance in this case is the maximum relative performance, based on IBM’s own rPerf metric.
A New High-End
The Power 795 replaces the older Power 595 as IBM’s high-end UNIX server. It is based on a similar design to the 595 and also has 32 sockets, but with 8-core POWER7 processors it scales up to 256 cores. By IBM’s own internal relative performance estimates the Power 795 extends the single system performance of the Power Server line-up by a significant amount, over the previous high-end Power 595 as the chart above shows.
A New Crop of Entry-Level Servers
But IDEAS feels the real news of this announcement and somewhat unexpected, was the low-end products that were introduced.
Four entry-level servers, the Power 710, 720, 730 and 740 were announced and include IBM’s first single socket POWER servers (in a non Blade format) since the POWER5 based System p5 505 was launched in 2005. With the POWER6 generation IBM appeared to be favouring the Blade form factor approach for low-end solutions and so didn’t release single socket Power servers in the rack or tower form factors. But with the POWER7 generation, these have made a reappearance.
There were predictions a while back that Blades could take over the computing world, but the above and even the emergence of new high-density form factors for highly scalable systems , which are based around stripped down 1U and 2U rack form factors, probably shows that although there is a place for Blades, other more traditional form factors, such as the good old 1U and 2U rack, and even the Tower form factor, still have a role to play.
- The Power 710 Express is a single socket 2U rack server.
- The Power 720 Express replaces the previous Power 520 model which was one of the most popular servers in the POWER6 range.
- The Power 730 Express is based on the same design as the Power 710 but with two processor sockets instead of one.
- The Power 740 Express is a dual socket server in either a tower or 4U rack form factor.
POWER7 Performance in Industry Benchmarks
IBM has disclosed some initial performance data for these new systems. Some highlights as to how they compare and contrast with the competition are outlined below.
Power 710
IBM has disclosed SPEC CPU and SPECjbb2005 results for the Power 710 Express. A six core configuration returned a result of 239 in SPECint_rate and 213 in SPECfp_rate while an 8-core configuration scored 289 and 248 respectively. These results are well ahead of the next best results for single socket systems in either workload. In SPECjbb2005 an 8-core configuration returned a score of 607,514 bops. This is nearly double the next best single socket result. Power 710 industry standard benchmark results
Power 730
For the Power 730 Express, IBM has disclosed SPEC CPU 2006, SPECjbb2005 and SPECompM2001 performance benchmark results. In SPECint_rate a 16-core configuration returned a result of 575 running AIX and 578 running Linux while in SPECfp_rate it scored 482 running AIX and 477 in Linux. Among two socket results these are only bettered by the Power 780 (with the exception of the Power 740) and are roughly equivalent to a four socket Opteron 6100 or Xeon 7500 equipped server. In SPECjbb2005 a 16-core configuration performed 1,216,983 bops in AIX and 1,205,289 in Linux. Again, these scores are only bettered by the Power 780 when compared to other two socket results. Power 730 industry standard benchmark results
Power 740
The Power 740 Express has similar results to the Power 730. In SPECint_rate2006 a 16 core configuration scored 577 running AIX and 580 running Linux. SPECfp_rate2006 scores are 481 and 492 respectively. In SPECjbb2005 a 16-core configuration performed 1,212,466 bops in AIX and 1,204,362 in Linux. Power 740 industry standard benchmark results
Power 795
IBM has also revealed some SPEC results for the Power 795. In SPECint_rate2006 a full 256-core configuration scored 11,200 running AIX and in SPECfp_rate2006 it scored 9,930 running Linux. The previous best SPECint_rate result was 3,354 and 3,507 in SPECfp_rate, so the Power 795 establishes a new high mark in both these benchmarks by a significant margin. (Note that there are some SGI results with higher baseline scores but no result score, however these can’t be compared to the IBM results at the time of writing because the baseline scores were unavailable.) Power 795 industry standard benchmark results
At this point in time there are no results for some of the more application focussed workloads, such as SAP or TPC-H etc. IBM did release an attention grabbing TPC-C result at the same time of this announcement, which broke the 10 Million tpmC barrier and bettered Oracle’s previous number 1 result. But this was using existing POWER7 Power 780 servers and didn’t feature any of the new models, such as the high-end Power 795.
The Bottom Line
- IBM has now completed its rollout of POWER7 servers with a full line of servers now available from the low to high-end.
- The company has raised the bar across the board in terms of performance, both compared to its own previous generation POWER6 based servers and against the competition, especially given the Intel Xeon 7500 (Nehalem-EX) developments throughout 2009 and 2010.
- We have seen a reappearance of entry-level 1-socket rack and even tower servers and a filling out of the range in general, with more options, compared with the previous generation offerings. This shows that despite the interest in new and emerging form factors and in particular Blades, there still seems to be enough interest in these more traditional sized systems and form factors.
- Finally, IBM has pushed the performance envelope at the high-end with the Power 795 with a powerful throughput server optimized for consolidation.
The new servers will be available on September 17th.
More information, including full specifications, performance and pricing coverage can be found in Competitive Profiles. Ideas International produces Competitive Profiles, which is a continuous, global information service that provides comprehensive coverage of the features, pricing, and performance characteristics of a wide range of enterprise IT products and services. Updated daily and delivered through a web browser, Competitive Profiles couples a rich online database of product and services information with a powerful suite of interactive analysis tools.
Contributions to this article came from Andrew Dun 
, Richard Partridge and Gary Burgess
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