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When the Power 750 was announced, it represented a rethinking of how we design systems in our mid-range Power Systems servers. The new thought brought architecture that was used on the hi-end, into the volume space. It was kind of cool.
Similar to its previous POWER7 version, the POWER7+ technology-based Power 750 design still provides 32 cores across 4 processor sockets, but the system design delivers a new architecture. The Power 750 (8404-E8D) and Power 760 systems introduce a two-tier interconnect architecture for a 4-socket system design. With this implementation, the socket and node are logically the same. For the Power 770, the system enclosure and the node are logically the same. For the Power 795, the book and node are logically the same. One tier is for intra-node communication, and the second tier is for inter-node communication. This two-tier interconnect enables more cores and greater throughput.
This architecture provides the best bandwidth and lowest latency between the chips within a DCM or socket (node) and a lower bandwidth and higher latency between DCMs or sockets (nodes). Therefore, when configuring workloads that span the DCM or socket (node) boundaries within a Power 750 (8408-E8D) and Power 760 (9109-RMD), take the same considerations into account as when deploying workloads that span multiple system enclosures on a Power 770 or Power 780 server to achieve optimum performance.
I wonder what will be in store for the next generation!
