IBM today announced new POWER7 systems designed to manage the most demanding emerging applications, ranging from smart electrical grids to real-time analytics for financial markets. The new systems incorporate a number of industry-unique technologies for the specialized demands of new applications and services that rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real time.

There are four new POWER7 systems:

* IBM Power 780, a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 POWER7 CPUs, and the new TurboCore workload optimizing mode. TurboCore can deliver up to two-times the performance per core of POWER processor-based systems, providing excellent ROI for applications with high per-core performance requirements, such as managing and analyzing transactions from a smart electrical grid.

* IBM Power 770, a modular enterprise system with up to 64 POWER7 cores, featuring higher performance per core than POWER6 processors and using up to 70 percent less energy for the same number of cores as the IBM Power 570.

* IBM Power 755, a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 POWER7 cores, Energy Star qualified for energy efficiency, and optimized for the most challenging analytic workloads.

* IBM Power 750 Express, an Energy Star qualified business server for mid-market clients offering four times the processing capacity of its predecessor, the IBM Power 550 Express, in the same energy envelope and 10 times the performance of a comparable HP Integrity rx6600. The Power 750 is three times more energy efficient than the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440, Sun's self-proclaimed "Coolthreads" server.

The Power 750 Express and 755 planned volume ship date is February 19 and the Power 770 and 780 planned volume availability is March 16.