IBM uncloaks eight core Power7 processor

Big Blue has officially uncloaked its nascent Power7 processor. According to William Starke of IBM, the 8-core chip is expected to feature 1.2B transistors and will be capable of achieving 20,000 coherent operations in flight.

Starke - who revealed details of the new processor at Hot Chips '09 - also noted that the Power7 would include 12 execution units per core, 32 threads per chip along with advanced pre-fetching data and instruction sets.