IBM POWER7 System Lineup Grows

It appears that better and faster transistors made of graphene aren't all that IBM is working on, since its recent press release speaks of a new set of POWER7 servers for demanding emerging applications.

Though not really focused on the consumer market, IBM is one of biggest names on the business, enterprise and industrial sectors as far as computing goes.

It has a large portfolio of equipment for both existing and emerging applications, with financial services, scientific research and healthcare management being just a few of its outlets.

What the company did most recently was deliver a new batch of better POWER7 blades and servers, which are also good for consolidation and virtualization.

"Our strategy appears to be paying off as more and more customers choose Power Systems," said Tom Rosamilia, general manager of IBM Power and z Systems.

One product is the 16-core, single-wide IBM BladeCenter PS703, which can be an alternative to sprawling racks and is good for people concerned with energy efficiency.

The BladeCenter PS704 is similar to its sibling above, only it has double the amount of cores and, thus, 60-percent faster performance in the same space requirements as previous-generation POWER7 products.

The announcement also mentions the upgraded IBM Power 750 Express and the enhanced Power 755, both with 32 POWER7 cores now.

"We are running billions of intense calculations based on Einstein's theory of relativity on the POWER7 blades," said Gaurav Khanna, professor of physics at UMass-Dartmouth.

"Running POWER7, I'm able to get results as much as eight times faster than running the same calculations on an Intel Xeon processor. Calculations that used to take a month to run are now finished in less than a week. This means that I can do eight times more science in the same timeframe than I could do before."

This page should have information on anything related to IBMs smarter computing initiative.