IBM Eye

IBM today announced what it claims to be the “fastest microprocessor ever built.”

Per the www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/21/ibm_power6_p570/

The updated p 570 system that can hold one to eight of the new 4.7GHz dual-core Power6 chips. When running the TPC benchmark, an eight-way version of the p 570 reached a score of 1.6m, which IBM reckons is three times the performance per core of HP’s top Itanium-based Superdome server. The bad news, however, is that customers won’t be able to buy the exact IBM box and software used in the TPC test until late November. HP is expected to have updated its Itanium servers by then.

It is built in a 65 nm process, houses 790 million transistors and runs at a clock speed of 4.7 GHz. (Coincidentally, the original IBM PC had a 4.77MHz CPU). Compared to the Power5 chip, the new version offers more than double the clock speed, four times the cache (8 MB) and surprisingly, has a similar power consumption profile.

Designed to work in virtualized server environments, a mid-sized Power6 powered server is capable of running 50 or more AIX partitions and to copy one partition to another with a mere few seconds of interruption. It has as many cycles / second as there are bytes on a DVD. In terms of bandwidth, the Power6 offers users an aggregate bandwidth of 300 GB/s – which in theory is enough to download Apple’s entire iTunes catalog in about 60 seconds.

Read more:
The Register (they broke the story - they’ve changed the text throughout the day, but this morning they had test results from Oracle’s website that were promptly removed. IBM may have pushed up their PR due to the news, like they did with the High-K release. If you don’t follow the register, you ought to.)
Slashdot discussion
IBM has confirmed that POWER6 has the same pipeline depth and roughly the same execution unit configuration as the POWER5