IBM stirs the pot with new Power7 systems

With the recent launch of its new range of Unix-based enterprise-level servers, IBM appears to have broadsided Sun -- oops, sorry: Oracle. IBM's new big iron brings new Power 7 chips which, we're told, are the outcome of $3.2 billion of research cash over the last three years, along with a pile of smart new software.

For the money, you get 64 cores per CPU, and a bunch of new features to improve the handling of multi-threaded applications, as well as a form of thin-provisioned memory -- allowing applications to see more RAM than is physically present. Overall, the new chip provides 4x the throughput of Power6, according to IBM Fellow Brad MacCredie.

They're suited to analysing massive data sets, such as business intelligence and analytics -- IBM touts a US university researching cancer research as an example application.

Could it be Sun/Oracle that suffers? IBM claims that the new Power 750 Express delivers 71 percent better price for performance than Sun's SPARC-based, mid-range T5440, and over 280 percent better than Sun's top-end M5000 and M4000 servers. It's hard to argue without access to the raw numbers -- IBM reckons the configurations were very similar, if you believe the press release.

Perhaps more importantly, the ability to do transaction processing as well as BI tasks makes them more versatile than the competition, according to Forbes' Andy Greenberg. He quotes Forrester analyst Brad Day saying that the new systems put IBM "18 to 24 months ahead of their competition." And, he adds: "Power7 allows them to fire missiles into the x86 space. You can clear out a hundred x86 servers and replace them with three of these."

Has IBM fired the bolt from hell into both the high- and low-end server markets?

And how will IBM's low-end server systems engineers, sales and marketing people feel about that. There's no love lost between the divisions: this is bound to deepen the divide.