Wicked core price

On the existing Power 750, there are four different processor feature cards. The one with the 3GHz, eight-core Power7 chip costs $5,940 for the processor card plus $3,100 per core to activate each core so it can be used to run AIX, i, or Linux. That works out to $3,843 per core, which is wickedly expensive even compared to top-end x64 processors.

The six-core Power7 chip spinning at 3.3GHz costs $7,000 for the processor card plus $4,850 to activate a core, or $6,017 per core when you activate all six cores on the card. The eight-core, 3.3GHz card costs $12,400, plus $6,000 per core for activation, which works out to $7,550 per core for all of them.

And finally, the eight-core Power7 chip running at 3.55GHz, which is only available in a 32-core configuration with four processor cards, works out to costing $11,125 per core.

Those are not prices that are sustainable for entry machines, Unix or otherwise. So it is reasonable to expect IBM to get the clock speeds on the entry Power Systems servers down to 2.5GHz or so and probably kiss 3GHz.

Heaven only knows what IBM will charge for processor feature cards, but considering it was going to throw out the half-dud, four-core chips, $1,000 for a processor card in a Power 710 or 720 server and maybe $500 per core to activate seems appropriate to compete against x64 iron more effectively.

IBM has an exaggerated opinion of what its Power Systems are worth, however, and is looking for profits, not volumes, so don't expect to see anything that low. ®

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