IBM's Power6 Chip Doubles speed, Consumes Same Energy

Today IBM officially announced its Power6 chip, claiming that the next-generation microprocessor for its Unix and Linux systems offers double the performance of the earlier Power5+ device while consuming roughly the same amount of electricity. IBM's new POWER6 chip is a 64 bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7 GHz and eight megabytes of on chip Level 2 cache.

The dramatic performance boost comes as the semiconductor industry has largely shifted its focus away from pure performance measurements and instead has become more concerned with a balance of performance and power consumption. Overheating becomes a major problem as transistors shrink and operate at breakneck speed. The trend among microprocessor makers is to focus on using multicore chips and throughput gains from techniques such as parallel processing to boost performance, instead of ratcheting up clock speeds. But with the Power6, IBM is working to keep both the multicore and clock speed avenues open.

The chip, which operates at 4.7GHz and cycles at a speed 25 million times as fast as the flap of hummingbird wings, will allow businesses to consolidate servers and handle substantially larger workloads. By comparison, Intel's Itanium 2 server processor tops out at 1.66GHz.

But the doubling of processing speed from the 2.2GHz Power5+ to the 4.7GHz Power 6 won't be the only reason that users upgrade to the new dual-core chip, predicted Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM's System p business unit. Companies will be able to move existing workloads to Power6-based systems and cut the energy use of their servers almost in half, Mauri said.

The Power6 will be generally available within two weeks in a new midrange server, called the System p 570, that can support up to eight physical processor sockets, for a total of 16 cores. The p 570 will run IBM's AIX version of Unix as well as Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux, and it will be aimed at server consolidation or database and application server uses.