IBM to Launch Power6 Chip Next Month

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Delivering on its promise of a superfast server chip, IBM Corp. said Monday that its new Power6 microprocessor will go on sale next month, boasting twice the clock speed of the previous generation while consuming roughly the same amount of power.

The dramatic performance boost comes as the semiconductor industry has largely shifted its focus away from pure performance measurements—overheating becomes a major problem as transistors shrink and operate at breakneck speeds—and instead has become more concerned with a balance of performance and power consumption.

While other chipmakers are dialing down clock speeds and adding more computing engines, or cores, to their chips to manage the competing concerns, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said its new dual-core chip is a breakthrough on both fronts.

Analysts said the chip, which operates at 4.7 gigahertz 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 Corp.'s Itanium 2 server processor tops out at 1.66 gigahertz.

In addition to raw power, the new IBM chip also has massive bandwidth—300 gigabytes per second—which the company says can process the download of the entire iTunes music catalog, currently more than 5 million songs, in about a minute.

To feed data quickly to the processor, IBM has quadrupled the amount of on-chip memory, or cache, to 8 megabytes. The chip is designed for higher-end servers running the Unix operating system and is accompanied by the launch of a new server designed around it.

"Go back a few years, and the Power brand was an also-ran in the big iron chip race—in fact, it wasn't really clear how committed IBM was to its own chip development," said Gordon Haff, principal IT adviser for Illuminata Inc. "But IBM decided to double down its bets on Power, and the results have been pretty impressive."

Bernard Meyerson, chief technologist of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, said the chip is the first product delivered under the company's energy efficiency initiative announced earlier this month. The campaign includes a pledge to spend $1 billion to spread technologies and services designed to make corporate computing centers more environmentally friendly.

Besides the obvious processing gains, "this translates into a much, much smaller carbon footprint" for companies, he said.

From marketwatch:

IBM Unleashes World's Fastest Chip in Powerful New Computer

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The POWER6 Chip: a Convention-Shattering Design

The POWER6 chip in the new IBM System p(TM) 570 server owns a number of industry "firsts." It is the first UNIX microprocessor able to calculate decimal floating point arithmetic in hardware. Until now, calculations involving decimal numbers with floating decimal points were done using software. The built-in decimal floating point capability gives tremendous advantage to enterprises running complex tax, financial and ERP programs.

The POWER6 processor is built using IBM's state-of-the-art 65 nanometer process technology. Coming at a time when some experts have predicted an end to Moore's Law, which holds that processor speed doubles every 18 months, the IBM breakthrough is driven by a host of technical achievements scored during the five-year research and development effort to develop the POWER6 chip. These include:

--  A dramatic improvement in the way instructions are executed inside the
    chip. IBM scientists increased chip performance by keeping static the
    number of pipeline stages -- the chunks of operations that must be
    completed in a single cycle of clock time -- but making each stage faster,
    removing unnecessary work and doing more in parallel. As a result,
    execution time is cut in half or energy consumption is reduced.

--  Separating circuits that can't support low voltage operation onto
    their own power supply "rails," allowing IBM to dramatically reduce power
    for the rest of the chip.

--  Voltage/frequency "slewing," enabling the chip to lower electricity
    consumption by up to 50 percent, with minimal performance impact.

--  A new method of chip design that enables POWER6 to operate at low
    voltages, allowing the same chip to be used in low power blade environments
    as well as large, high-performance symmetric multiprocessing machines. The
    chip has configurable bandwidth, enabling customers to choose maximum
    performance or minimal cost.

The POWER6 chip includes additional techniques to conserve power and reduce heat generated by POWER6 processor-based servers. Processor clocks can be dynamically turned off when there is no useful work to be done and turned back on when there are instructions to be executed.

Power saving is also realized when the memory is not fully utilized, as power to parts of the memory not being utilized is dynamically turned off and then turned back on when needed. In cases where an over-temperature condition is detected, the POWER6 chip can reduce the rate of instruction execution to remain within an acceptable, user-defined temperature envelope.

IBM plans to introduce the POWER6 chip throughout the System p and System i server lines.

World's first UNIX server with active virtual machine mobility

Also announced today, IBM is unveiling an industry-first with a new feature that provides customers with the ability to move live virtual machines from one physical UNIX server to another while maintaining continuous availability. Coined the POWER6 Live Partition Mobility function, this technology -- currently in beta, with general availability planned for later this year -- enables customers to move active virtualized partitions without temporarily suspending them. While competing offerings require a disruptive reboot of the UNIX system and software stack, IBM is the first vendor to help clients optimize resource utilization on a broader scale by allowing administrators to think of large groups of servers as a fluid resource rather than focusing on each server as a single entity with a dedicated purpose.

IBM's Power6 spotted bashing Oracle at 4.7GHz

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The Register has spotted four 4.7GHz - yep, you read that right - Power6 chips cranking on Oracle 11i. The speedy chips confirm IBM's boasting that Power6 would arrive near 5GHz. They also show that IBM's customers have a lot to look forward to in terms of raw performance.

With 4.7GHz chips (4MB of L2 and 32MB of L3 cache), an IBM p570 server showed an average response time of .625 seconds when handling requests from 2,100 users. That compares to a p570 with 2.2GHz Power5+ chips that had a response time of .983 seconds for 2,000 users.

You can catch all the benchmarks here until Oracle notices this story (Update: Oracle has removed the results). We've also taken the liberty of copying a PDF report on the results for you here.

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