The power7TM processor SoC

Abstract

Introducing POWER7TM the latest member of the IBM POWERTM processor family. A 567mm² chip implemented in 45nm SOI technology, holding eight quad threaded cores, a 32MB shared eDRAM L3, two memory controllers and high bandwidth SMP interfaces. The new out of order, shallow pipeline core with 12 execution units, multiport L1 caches and a private 256kB L2 offers the efficiency to support 4x the number of cores within the same power envelope as its predecessor. Supporting over 4GHz, the L1 data cache loop is kept to 2 cycles. Data from the L2 can be returned to the core at a rate of 32B per cycle.