Re: Cores, Threads and Intel vs Power7

From: Kirk Goins
Does this mean by Intel and Window's standards that a Power7 Quad
Core running IBM i 7.1 is really a 16 core system?

I sometimes get mixed up by the terminology too. But my understanding is that Power 7 chips may have 4, 6, or 8 individual cores, and that each core may have 1-4 threads configurable threads. For example one configuration might be 1 socket, 8 cores, for a sum of 24 execution threads. 

I read somewhere that IBM was working on a design that layered chips vertically, which made it possible to extend the number of cores per socket. So the breakdown someday may be threads within cores, cores within vertical layers, and vertical layers within sockets, and sockets within mother boards. For example, 1 socket with 4 layers, with 8 cores per layer, with 4 threads per core. That would equate to 128 execution threads within a single socket.