Power7 Processor-Based Blades; Memory Subsystem; Memory Placement Rules - IBM BladeCenter PS700 Technical Overview And Introduction

2.3 POWER7 processor-based blades

The PS700 blade contains a single processor socket with a four-core processor and eight
DDR3 memory DIMM slots. The PS701 blade contains a single processor socket with an
eight-core processor and 16 DDR3 memory DIMM slots. The PS702 blade contains two
processor sockets, each with a eight-core processor and a total of 32 DDR3 memory DIMM
slots. The cores in all these blades run at 3.0 GHz.
POWER7 processor-based blades support POWER7 processors with various processors
core counts. Table 2-3 summarizes the POWER7 processors for the PS700, PS701, and
PS702 blades.
Table 2-3 Summary of POWER7 processor options for the PS700, PS701, and PS702 blades
Blade Model
PS700
PS701
PS702

2.4 Memory subsystem

The PS700 4-core processor contains one integrated DDR3 memory controller and two
memory buffers that can interface with a total of eight DDR3 DIMMS. The PS701 single
8-core processor, and the PS702's two 8-core processors chips also use a single memory
controller per processor chip but use four memory buffers that can access a total of 16 or 32
DDR3 DIMMS respectively.
Industry standard DDR3 Registered DIMM (RDIMM) technology is used to increase reliability,
speed, and density of memory subsystems.

2.4.1 Memory placement rules

The minimum DDR3 memory capacity for the PS700, PS701, and PS702 8 GB (2 x 4 GB
DIMMs). The maximum memory supported is as follows:
PS700 64 GB (8 x 8 GB)
PS701 128 GB (16 x 8 GB)
PS702 256 GB (32 x 8 GB)
Note: DDR2 memory (used in POWER6 processor-based systems) is not supported in
POWER7 processor-based systems.
Figure 2-7 on page 47 show the PS701 physical memory DIMM topology. Figure 2-8 on
page 47 shows the PS701 and PS702 base blade.
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IBM BladeCenter PS700, PS701, and PS702 Technical Overview and Introduction
Cores per Number of
POWER7 POWER7
processor processors
4 1
8 1
8 2
Frequency L3 cache size
(GHz) per POWER7
processor (MB)
3.0 16
3.0 32
3.0 32