IBM Power 720 User Manual

148 IBM Power 720 and 740 Technical Overview and Introduction
Table 3-6 lists the support of specific programming features for various versions of Linux.
Table 3-6 Linux support for POWER7+ features
See the following sources for information:
򐂰 Advance Toolchain:
http://ibm.co/106nMYI
򐂰 Release notes:
– ftp://linuxpatch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/toolchain/at/at05/suse/SLES_11/release_notes.a
t05-2.1-0.html
– ftp://linuxpatch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/toolchain/at/at05/redhat/RHEL5/release_notes.a
t05-2.1-0.html
Features Linux releases Comments
SLES 10 SP4 SLES 11 SP2 RHEL 5.8 RHEL 6.3
POWER6
compatibility
mode
Ye s Ye s Ye s Ye s -
POWER7 mode No Yes No Yes Take advantage of the
POWER7+ and POWER7
features.
Strong Access
Ordering
No Yes No Yes Can improve Lx86
performance.
Scale to 256 cores
and 1024 threads
No Yes No Yes Base OS support is
available.
Four-way SMT No Yes No Yes Better hardware usage.
VSX support No Yes No Yes Full exploitation requires
Advance Toolchain.
Distro toolchain
mcpu/mtune=p7
No Yes No Yes SLES11/GA toolchain has
minimal POWER7 and
POWER7+ enablement
necessary to support
kernel build.
Advance
Toolchain support
Yes, execution
restricted to
POWER6
instructions
Yes Yes, execution
restricted to
POWER6
instructions
Yes Alternative GNU Toolchain
that explores the
technologies available on
POWER architecture.
64 KB base page
size
No Yes Yes Yes Better memory utilization,
and smaller footprint.
Tickless idle No Yes No Yes Improved energy utilization
and virtualization of
partially to fully idle
partitions.

IBM Power 720 Specifications

General

Brand	IBM
Model	Power 720
Category	Server
Language	English