AIX Power Processors (Power4, Power5, Power6)

Power6 =are made on a wafer (silicon)
300 mm=1 ft
Roughly 120 Power6 chips


# How many CPUs in a Power chip?
- The answer is TWO
- 2 CPUs
- 2 Processors
- 2 Cores
- 2 Way
- same answer with POWER4, POWER5 and POWER6


Confusions that arise in the packaging of Power chips

POWER5 Dual Chip Module
- In a single 2 inch module
- One Power Chip
- One L3 memory cache chip
This has 2 CPUs/Cores

POWER5 Quad Chip Module
- In single 2 inch module
- Two Power chip
- Two L3 Memory caches
This has 4 CPUs/Cores

POWER5 Multi Chip Module
- In a single 4 inch module
- Four Power Chips (center)
- Four L3 Memory caches
This has 8 CPUs/Cores
Used in POWER5 p595

Power 6 is simpler


Power 6 users Dual Chip Module
- One Power Chip
- One L3 memory cache chip
- In a single 2 inch module
This has 2 CPUs/Cores
Except:
- Very Low End models leave out the L3 cache to reduce the cost
- High End p595 has two L3 cache chips for extra performance

# Determining the number of physical CPUs?

Stand-alone AIX machine
- lsconf | pg
- lsdev -Cc processor

HMC controlled machine with Logical Partitions (LPAR)
- At the HMC
Systems Management>Servers>
- Contents of: Servers
- Configured Processor Units column
- At an LPAR
- lparstat -i
- Maximum Physical CPUs in system
- Active Physical CPUs in system