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Each year at Stanford University the giants of the microprocessor industry come to the Hot Chips conference to showcase their newest and most powerful processors. During the conference the chips are run through benchmarks and one will walk away with bragging rights of the fastest processor available.

At this year’s conference, IBM is tossing its new Power7 CPU into the fray and many expect it to walk away with a win against new products from Sun, Intel, and AMD. The Power7 CPU is an eight-core CPU that is built using a 45nm process. Much of the expected performance improvements in the chip are not in clock speed, but in the processors ability to work in parallel and in the amount of cache it has.

Power7 is expected to support as much or more cache than the competition and have bandwidth for threads and memory bandwidth as high as any of the competing chips.

Analyst Nathan Brookwood from Insight64 said, “I am sure Power7 will be the fastest processor around, probably faster than Intel’s Nehalem in some benchmarks.”

Among the advances in the Power7 CPU is the use of a mix of SRAM and embedded DRAM technology. The two types of memory are packed into one die along with the processor; previous generations of the Power processor from IBM used separate dies.

IBM’s Bill Starke said, “We knew when we hit this level of multi-core design, we would have to make the shift (to one die for CPU and cache). We’ve been talking about this for several processor generations.”

The Power7 has an eDRAM cache and a few other tricks that allow IBM to go beyond the 300Gb/second bandwidth range. The CPU runs a lower clock frequency than the Power6 CPU it replaces did, but makes up for that with better support for multithreading, which has been bumped from two threads per core to as many as four per core.

IBM is reportedly running systems in its labs with up to 32 of the Power7 CPUs inside.