IBM Doubles Speed With 4.7Ghz Power6 Chip

IBM does indeed want you to know that the new Power6 dual core processors are fast, but also of importance to Big Blue is the green factor. The new 4.7Ghz chips are said to double the Power5 line and use the same amount of power. Not a bad deal. It’s like a 2 for 1 deal at the local thrift store, except with less chance of moth holes in that swank new diamond patterned sweater. Well, maybe that’s a horrible analogy but it’s still cool to get more speed whilst using an equal amount of power.

IBM’s plan for the chip is the System p570, a new server ready for configuration of two to sixteen cores. While many companies are moving to Windows and Linux based servers with the advancements on that side of things, IBM is set to take on the big Unix boys like Sun Microsystems. According to IBM’s press release the Power6 use symmetric multithreading (SMT) that allows the chip to appear as four cores, each one executing instructions. This intelligent use of resources allows for even faster processing for those heavy jobs. Big Blue also says the Power6 chip’s bandwidth of about 300 gigabytes per second could download the entire iTunes library in 60 seconds, which is 30 times faster than HP’s Itanium.

Both the chip and server will be available in two weeks. Coming down the road is virtualization technology, which will allow live transfer of virtualized partitions to other servers. IBM announced a beta with a release for the full version to come later in 2007. Following that in November is the next version of IBM’s Unix OS, called AIX 6. The beta for that is due in July.