Ibm To Unveil 4-5 Ghz Power6 Processor

IBM is going to launch it's Power6 Processor for servers. This multicore processor is expected to run between 4-5Ghz without major losses in power efficiency. Even at such speeds the heat dissipation will be far less thus bypassing the threat of silicon meltdown.

Here's a short exerpt:

IBM's upcoming Power6, which is multicore and designed for higher-end servers running the Unix operating system, was crafted from the ground up to run fast without major losses in power efficiency, said Bernard Meyerson, chief technologist of IBM's Systems and Technology Group.
"In Power6, we basically combined everything we could (throw) at it in terms of fundamental atoms and molecules all the way out to what we knew would be the software that would run on top of that system," he said.

Power6 is expected to run between 4 and 5 gigahertz. Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 server processor today tops out at 1.66 gigahertz. The Pentium 4 for desktops currently reaches speeds of 3.8 gigahertz.

"Despite the speeds, it will have a lower power density than in some chips found in today's desktops," Meyerson said.

Details of the chip, which is scheduled to be available next year, were being presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. The conference runs through Friday.

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Regards,
m^e

SICK! (The good kind) I want one of those chips and put it on a new rig w/ Linux installed :)xboxrulz

Dam! Wish I could have one of those babies. Wonder how it would perform with HL2 or Doom3. Maybe a graphics card itself won't be required anymore .

well, it won't work with HL2 or Doom 3 since it's a PPC processor compared to a x86 processor that HL2/Doom3 need.xboxrulz

You mean to say they've got a 4-5GHz processor and I can't even play games on it?!! Then what's the point? :)What OS does a PPC use? I know there are Linux versions ported to PPC, but does IBM have it's own OS?

What OS does a PPC use? I know there are Linux versions ported to PPC, but does IBM have it's own OS?

AIX is the Unix version for Power systems. The 64-cpu systems (64 cpu's on a single mother board!) with the power5 chip are the biggest systems currently in the world.On these systems you can also create sub-partitions (giving 0.1 cpu to an operating system), and this operating system can be AIX or Linux (Red Hat or Suze).
Oracle on AIX systems now has the record of the most powerful database system.
And also Oracle for Linux on PowerPC is now available.
Unfortunately, these huge systems are professional ones. They are still rather expensive, so nobody buys them for playing games. Except if you thind that printing end-of-the month payrolls or selling airplane tickets is a kind of gaming.

Oh ok. Thanks for clearing that up Yordan. You know, after reading the first half of your post, I was kinda thinking "I gotta get me one of these", then I read what you said at the end .So, the PPCs are used mostly for commercial applications that are heavily loaded. That's really neat. I wonder if our univ has any of these systems installed on campus. I'll go check them out when I have time.