IBM Power7 has eight 4GHz cores

Some internal documents of IBM's upcoming Power7 processor were leaked to The Register and the site reports this will be a eight-core part. The Power7 chips will arrive in 2010, they'll be made on a 45nm process and will have clockspeeds of around 4GHz.

The documents unveil IBM will place the Power7 in dual-chip modules so you get 16 cores per module. Each core has 32 gigaFLOPS of computing power so a Power7 module will deliver 512 gigaFLOPS.

The IBM documents have the eight-core Power7 being arranged in dual-chip modules. So, that's 16-cores per module. As IBM tells it, each core will show 32 gigaflops of performance, bringing each chip to 256 gigaflops. Just on the gigaflop basis, that makes Power7 twice as fast per core as today's dual-core Power6 chips, although the actual clock rate on the Power7 chips should be well below the 5.0GHz Power6 speed demon.

In fact, according to our documents, IBM will ship Power7 at 4.0GHz in 2010 on a 45nm process. We're also seeing four threads per core on the chip.

For some customers, IBM looks set to create 2U systems with four of the dual-chip modules, giving the server 64 cores of fun. These 2U systems will support up to 128GB of memory and hit 2 teraflops.

IBM has an architecture that will let supercomputing types combine these 2U boxes to form a massive unit with 1,024 cores, hitting 32 teraflops of performance with 2TB of memory.

The site also says IBM is still working on their Quasar project where it combines Power and Cell chips.