POWER7

POWER7 is IBM's family of 64-bit POWER microprocessors introduced in 2010 as part of the POWER architecture lineage. It followed POWER6 and was designed to deliver higher throughput and greater energy efficiency for enterprise server workloads. POWER7-based systems were deployed in IBM’s System p and System i families and later in IBM Power Systems, often in conjunction with PowerVM virtualization software and related system software.

Architecturally, POWER7 implements a wide-issue, out-of-order execution engine. Each core supports simultaneous multithreading with up to four hardware threads (SMT4), and a single POWER7 chip can contain up to eight cores, enabling substantial concurrent execution. The design includes an integrated memory controller and a cache hierarchy optimized for server workloads, with support for large memory configurations and coherence across cores. The processor emphasizes virtualization, reliability, and system management, with features intended to improve workload isolation, dynamic power management, and overall data-center efficiency.

Impact and usage: POWER7 delivered higher throughput for multithreaded and virtualization-heavy workloads, including databases, analytics, and enterprise applications, along with improvements in performance per watt compared with earlier POWER generations. It supported IBM's dynamic resource management and partitioning capabilities, enabling scalable, consolidated server deployments.

Variants and successors: The POWER7 family includes the POWER7+ refresh with incremental performance enhancements and additional features. The line was followed by POWER8 in 2014 as IBM’s next generation of high-end server processors.