E@zyVG’s Vichar::World Connected

IBM claims its new 4.7GHz dual-core Power6 microprocessor is the fastest ever built, offering twice the performance of its predecessor while consuming hardly any more power.

IBM just launched the dual-core 64-bit POWER6 processor, built in a 65 nm process, 790 million transistors and runs at a clock speed of 4.7 GHz., which doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it.

The POWER6 chip has a total cache size of 8 MB per chip – four times the POWER5 chip – to keep pace with the processor bandwidth. With 300 GB/s on tap, IBM boasts that its processor has so much bandwidth that the POWER6 chip could download the entire iTunes catalog in about 60 seconds. IBM believes that it has designed the POWER6 chip with a balanced amount of bandwidth and processing power. IBM is so happy with the benchmark results that it has dedicated an entire section of their site to publishing POWER6 benchmarks on a whole slew of different types of workloads.

IBM’s new POWER6 chip is a 64-bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7 GHz and 8 MB L2 cache

What is remarkable about the processor is that IBM apparently made significant improvements in power consumption. According to the company the Power6 processor does not consumer more power at 4.7 GHz than the Power5 at 2.2 GHz – while providing roughly twice the overall performance. Scaled down to the predecessor’s clock speed, the Power6 consumes only half as much power through a process called “voltage/frequency slewing,” IBM claims.

In another design to reduce energy consumption and heat production, 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. Also, the chip has configurable bandwidth, enabling customers to choose maximum performance or minimal cost.Parts of the memory not being utilized are 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.

Cross section of a IBM POWER6, photographed using a scanning electron microscope, shows two transistors in gold.

Indeed, POWER6 is looking significantly better than the IPF lineup for a number of tasks, a fact that makes one wonder about the impact that the new launch will have on competitors.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.