IBM to Reveal Power7 Secrets at Hot Chips

August 24, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue is getting ready to lift the curtain a little higher on its forthcoming Power7 processors. Tomorrow (August 25), two of the top chip techies at IBM will be giving presentations at the annual Hot Chips conference hosted by the IEEE at Stanford University describing the Power7 chips and their related server technology.

As we reported at the end of July, IBM has already confirmed that the Power7 chips, which are expected sometime early next year, will come in different sizes, with four, six, or eight processor cores. And to keep customers from getting too nervous, IBM has also guaranteed that Power 570 and Power 595 customers who have machines based on Power6 and Power6+ processors will have an upgrade path to move to the Power7 chips in their existing systems, with some changes to account for different memory technologies. (I went into this in detail in the August 3 edition of The Four Hundred–well, as much detail as I was able to get out of Big Blue.)

On the second day of the Hot Chips 21 conference, Ron Kalla, one of the engineers on various Power chip design projects, is giving a presentation entitled Power7: IBM’s Next Generation Power Microprocessor. It was Kalla who six years ago to the day went to Hot Chips to introduce the dual-core Power5 processor to the chip geek community.

Right after Kalla, William Starke, another one of the top chippers at IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, will give a presentation called Power7: IBM’s Next Generation Balanced Power Server Chip, which will presumably look at the interplay of performance and power consumption in Power7 servers.

Whatever it is Kalla and Starke talk about, I am chasing it down to tell you all about it.

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