Life on Mars Links

POWER7
November 28, 2004 10:24 AM

Strange and interesting that the POWER line can be so resiliant that it continues to pass benchmarks when the chips are badly broken.

One of the jobs that my colleagues and I had to do in POWER3 was add performance tests to the manufacturing line, because we discovered that we had so much ability to cope with errors that machines that were very badly broken were still passing functional tests, they just passed it too slowly. So we had to add additional tests to ensure that they were actually passing the functional tests at the right speed. And that continues to be an issue, because our machines do tolerate a large number of different types of failures.