5137ch03.fm
Draft Document for Review October 14, 2014 10:19 am
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IBM Power Systems E870 and E880 Technical Overview and Introduction
The Power E880 has statement of direction to support up to 192 cores in a single system.
Here are the maximum numbers:
192 dedicated partitions
1024 micropartitions
An important point is that the maximum amounts are supported by the hardware, but the
practical limits depend on application workload demands.
Consider the following additional information about virtual processors:
A virtual processor can be running (dispatched) either on a physical core or as standby
waiting for a physical core 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 a 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.