Re: GHZ of an IBM Power system

The answer to that question has been given by IBM in two ways:

CPW (Commercial Processing Workload) for IBM i
rPerf (Relative Performance) for AIX

Those are values that are posted for each feature of each machine. Search
for power5 CPW and you'll find how much each model had. That also takes
into account limited systems, where you had 2 cores and only 0,32 active
and stuff like that.

Another thing is that for the machine to reach said CPW levels you might
have to add RAM or IO cards, since CPU capacity is useless if you need to
move data and the controllers can't handle it...

So it remains the same. Go into the SST, find out your proc feat and then
look it up. You'll find out what proc it is, how fast it goes and how it
compares to other machines via the CPW metric.

Best Regards,

Roberto


On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 3:50 PM, Justin Dearing <zippy1981@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't have the answer to your question. However, this wikipedia article
lists the range of clockspeeds opf Power8 chips, which are whats in a
modern IBMi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER8

That being said clock speed is a bad measurement. Its like measuring
lightbulb brightness in watts. For incadescent bulbs manufactured by
sylvania and GE, it was an OK metric For the average american a 100 watt
was a 100watt bulb. There were two big manufacturers to my knowledged, GE
and Sylvania. Their wares were pretty damn similar. (Please lightbulb
nerds, tell me I'm wrong here). There were big fluorescent tubes and rings,
but they were the exception and needed special fixtures anyway. People
understood wattage, sort of. At the very least they could relate it to
their power bill which was measured in kilowatt hours.

Then along came CFLs and LEDs, and all of a sudden you need to know
something about lumens and color, until someone makes an LED for under $5
that's actually really close to incandescent characteristics, patents the
tech, and licenses the tech to everyone else, and then companies will stop
innovating lightbulbs for 20-100 years.

Now in the 90s in the PC world CPUs made by intel got progressively faster.
They got more instructions per second (Mips), by having more transistors
and running at a faster clock speed. Also, instructions got more
sophisticated like the ability to do arithmic on 4 diffent pairs of values
at the same time (Pentium MMX, which was good for graphics that had 4
channels red, green, blue+alpha (transparency)). If you have a really
expensive server, you might have had 2 or 4 intel CPUs, and a version of
Windows NT that could sort of divide the word between them.

But regardless, the idea was intel made your CPU. New CPUs came out all the
time that were better and faster, and clock speeds were ever increasing.
Other than a few exceptions like the 100mhz 486 that was slower than a
90mhz pentium, And people believed meghertz meant speed of the computer to
do work in an end user sense of the term.

Except, this completely fell apart if you bought a DEC Alpha, a Mac, or an
AS/400. because mhz is a great measure of how fast a particular
architecture of CPU is working, it doesn't take into account the robustness
of the instruction set, the pipeline cache, or the fact that the assembly
language that gets fed to a modern CPU is actually abstracted into a
completely different form of microcode.


So, really, you question has a definite answer, but its the wrong question.


Justin





On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 2:13 PM Ketzes, Larry <lketzes@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If I wasn't clear, I'm looking on how to determine the CPU ghz of a given
system.

From: Ketzes, Larry
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2015 2:12 PM
To: 'midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: GHZ of an IBM Power system

I usually know the ghz of a system when I'm buying it, but is there a way
to see the ghz of a system that I didn't personally buy? I'm thinking
somewhere on a rack config or on the HMC?


Thanks, Larry

Larry Ketzes | Lead Enterprise Infrastructure Engineer | Midrange
Engineering | EI&A
MetLife | 101 MetLife Way, Cary, NC 27513 | T. 919-907-5229 |
lketzes@xxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:lketzes@xxxxxxxxxxx>

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