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The Bandwidth of POWER8

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Abstract

The Bandwidth of POWER8

Body

 

Businesses today are steeped in an overabundance of data that they collect and create every day. While IT is being called upon to leverage this data for insights that can transform the organization, data centers have essentially been maxed out. The mandate to deliver the insights and analytics that are hiding in the data is not feasible or cost effective within the framework of current computing capabilities. 

There’s no question that it’s time for an entirely new and scalable analytics engine, driven by bigger memory, lower latency and better reliability.  

With a vision for enhanced bandwidth, IBM POWER8 has achieved vast improvements in latency, two-and-a-half time’s better memory performance, and a lot more.

POWER8 offers more than 32 channels of DDR memory funneling into the POWER8 processor. This is two times the 16-channel capacity for POWER7, and four times the eight-channel capacity of the most competitors. 

The result of a depth and breadth of innovation focused on optimizing for data centers, while increasing efficiency and lowering infrastructure cost, the POWER8 bandwidth contributes to a better system that does more while making technology leadership attainable for customers. 

Each POWER8 socket supports up to 1 TB of DRAM in the initial server configurations, yielding 2 TB capacity Scale-out systems and 16 TB capacity Enterprise systems, and supports up to 230 GBs per second of sustained memory bandwidth per socket.

Having developed the first processor designed for Big Data with massive parallelism and bandwidth for real-time results, when coupled with IBM DB2 with BLU Acceleration and Cognos analytics software the capacity of POWER8 far outpaces industry standard options with 82x faster delivery to insights

Far more than a function of size, sophisticated innovations in the POWER8 memory organization is designed to enhance both reliability and performance. Key among the innovations:  
  • Up to eight high-speed channels which each run up to 9.6 GHz for up to 230 GB of sustained performance
  • Up to 32 total DDR ports yielding 410 GB/sec peak at the DRAM
  • Up to 1 TB memory capacity per fully configured processor socket
Big Data’s Big Memory requirements call for nothing less than the industry’s most innovative, scalable, and massive bandwidth and capacity. POWER8 thrives on the kinds of complexities that your organization faces in the current environment, with a platform to keep you ahead of the game as unforeseen challenges and opportunities emerge. 

Learn more about the unique advantages offered by Power Systems scale-out servers, in this paper written by Robert Frances Group, "The Power Scale-out Advantage."

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