POWER7POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Rochester, MN; Austin, TX; Essex Junction, VT; T. J. Watson Research Center, NY; Bromont, QC and IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH, Böblingen, Germany laboratories. IBM announced servers based on POWER7 on 8 February 2010.
POWER6The POWER6 is a microprocessor developed by IBM that implemented the Power ISA v.2.03. When it became available in systems in 2007, it succeeded the POWER5+ as IBM's flagship Power microprocessor. It is claimed to be part of the eCLipz project, said to have a goal of converging IBM's server hardware where practical (hence "ipz" in the acronym: iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries). POWER6 was described at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in February 2006, and additional details were added at the Microprocessor Forum in October 2006 and at the next ISSCC in February 2007.
POWER9POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in 12- and 24-core versions, for scale out and scale up applications, and possibly other variations, since the POWER9 architecture is open for licensing and modification by the OpenPOWER Foundation members.
Multi-core processorA multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such as add, move data, and branch) but the single processor can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques.
Computer architectureIn computer science, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the description may include the instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine.
Zen (microarchitecture)Zen is the codename for a family of computer processor microarchitectures from AMD, first launched in February 2017 with the first generation of its Ryzen CPUs. It is used in Ryzen (desktop and mobile), Ryzen Threadripper (workstation/high end desktop), and Epyc (server). Zen (first generation) The first generation Zen was launched with the Ryzen 1000 series of CPUs (codenamed Summit Ridge) in February 2017. The first Zen-based preview system was demonstrated at E3 2016, and first substantially detailed at an event hosted a block away from the Intel Developer Forum 2016.
Simultaneous multithreadingSimultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of superscalar CPUs with hardware multithreading. SMT permits multiple independent threads of execution to better use the resources provided by modern processor architectures. The term multithreading is ambiguous, because not only can multiple threads be executed simultaneously on one CPU core, but also multiple tasks (with different page tables, different task state segments, different protection rings, different I/O permissions, etc.
Power10Power10 is a superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessor family, based on the open source Power ISA, and announced in August 2020 at the Hot Chips conference; systems with Power10 CPUs. Generally available from September 2021 in the IBM Power10 Enterprise E1080 server. The processor is designed to have 15 cores available, but a spare core will be included during manufacture to cost-effectively allow for yield issues. Power10-based processors will be manufactured by Samsung using a 7 nm process with 18 layers of metal and 18 billion transistors on a 602 mm2 silicon die.
POWER5The POWER5 is a microprocessor developed and fabricated by IBM. It is an improved version of the POWER4. The principal improvements are support for simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and an on-die memory controller. The POWER5 is a dual-core microprocessor, with each core supporting one physical thread and two logical threads, for a total of two physical threads and four logical threads. Technical details of the microprocessor were first presented at the 2003 Hot Chips conference.
Superscalar processorA superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a superscalar processor can execute more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to different execution units on the processor. It therefore allows more throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time) than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate.
