IBM Rolls Out New Power 7 With Watson Power

By Marcus Yam
published

Elementary.

IBM has announced new workload-optimized POWER7 systems, including a performance boost to the Power 750 – the same server used in Watson, the Jeopardy! winner.

New are the 16-core, single-wide IBM BladeCenter PS703 and 32-core, double-wide IBM BladeCenter PS704 blade servers, which give clients an alternative to sprawling racks.

The enhanced IBM Power 750 Express, the same system that powers Watson, has been upgraded with several options, including a faster POWER7 processor that offers more than three times the performance of comparable 32-core servers, such as Oracle's SPARC T3-2 server, and more than twice the performance of HP's Integrity BL890c i2.

"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."

So yes, it can play… Jeopardy!

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
19 Comments Comment from the forums
  • macelo
    but can it play crysis?
    Reply
  • The_King
    My i7 can do that in half the time
    Reply
  • opmopadop
    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

    So thats less than a 5 day working week yeah?

    Get Watson to answer this one.

    Im going back to doing more science while I wait for the answer...
    Reply
  • meat81
    Well it definitely can play a Crysis 2 port!!!!!!!!
    Reply
  • artax33
    This means that I can do eight times more science...
    Sounds a little like GLaDOS in Portal.
    Reply
  • K2N hater
    I'm sure the professor will find a way to make calculations so complex it will take a month to complete.
    Reply
  • NapoleonDK
    artax33Sounds a little like GLaDOS in Portal.^^This. :D
    Reply
  • igot1forya
    "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"

    Did I miss something in my math? I count only 4x as much work, certainly by "less than a week" he means, "less than 4 days" because a week is still 7 days and a month is a 28-31 days, last I checked.

    2+2=5 for large instances of 2? Perhaps...
    Reply
  • virtualban
    macelobut can it play crysis?I would dare ask a more frightening question: When will "it" advance enough to be called "he" or "she"?
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    If its called Watson i'm pretty sure it's a "He"
    Reply