IBM Power 720 Overview page 142

The Power 740 allows up to 16 cores in a single system, supporting the following maximums:
Up to 16 dedicated partitions
Up to 320 micropartitions (maximum 20 micropartitions per physical active core)
An important point is that the maximum values stated are supported by the hardware, but the
practical limits depend on application workload demands.
Note the following additional information about virtual processors:
A virtual processor can be running (dispatched) either on a physical processor or as
standby waiting for a physical processor to became available.
Virtual processors do not introduce any additional abstraction level. They are only a
dispatch entity. When running on a physical processor, virtual processors run at the same
speed as the physical processor.
Each partition's profile defines CPU entitlement that determines how much processing
power any given partition should receive. The total sum of CPU entitlement of all partitions
cannot exceed the number of available physical processors in a shared processor pool.
The number of virtual processors can be changed dynamically through a dynamic
LPAR operation.
The minimum number of virtual processors is equal to the entitled capacity rounded up to
the nearest whole number.
The maximum number of virtual processors is the smaller of the following items:
– Rounding up the number twenty times the entitled capacity
– The number of active cores in the system
Processing mode
When you create a logical partition, you can assign entire processors for dedicated use, or
you can assign partial processing units from a shared processor pool. This setting defines the
processing mode of the logical partition.
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IBM Power 720 and 740 Technical Overview and Introduction