02-23-2013
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A short answer is:
speed and energy consumption.
Also, POWER7 supports SMT4 while POWER5 and POWER6 only support SMT2 (processor super scaling).
There are major architecular differences, but they are binary compatible (p 5 -> p6 -> p7).
Applications compiled using shared libraries usually work over hardware and AIX levels, but with static libraries you may have issues when changing AIX levels.
