Power6 from IBM rocks

May 22nd, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/news/2190355/ibm-power6-set-unix-speed-king

….The dual-core Power6 chip will run at speeds up to 4.7GHz, a rate that is towards the upper end of expectations and twice the clock speed of the Power5. IBM said it already has 6GHz chips running in its labs so, together with the latest 65-nanometre manufacturing process IBM is using, headroom for faster speeds should be available. Server configurations up to eight-way, with 16 cores, will be generally available within two weeks.

To balance the system, Power6 has enormous processor bandwidth at 300 gigabytes per second and up to 8MB RAM caches on every chip. For now at least, the architecture will be enough to give IBM the speed crown across many key benchmarks and present an attractive target system for consolidation and virtualisation projects.

Very cool, the Power6 does sound really cool, there’s a blog with content about it, do check it out: http://www-03.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/benchmarking?tag=POWER6 – is a blog on IBM all about the Power6 processor with links to the benchmarks, in the high performance computing arena the performance does look stunning: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/benchmarks/hpc.html

Whether they are right for your business, your applications will depend on you and your business, but couple the Power6 processor with the ability to run x86 Linux applications and you do have an interesting proposition, I wonder what the thermals are like for the blade edition though?

I wonder how this will challenge Sun, HP and the other vendors?

discussion by DISQUS
Add New Comment