Posted on 02/07/2006 2:06:47 PM PST by LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget
IBM will unveil a new processor on Tuesday that will be twice as fast as those of competitors such as Sun, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) and AMD when it appears in 2007, according to the group.
IBM's Power6 chip is a radical departure from the trend among microprocessor makers to produce more energy-efficient chips after their race to increase speeds created overheating problems.
IBM said it had broken through energy and heat barriers with the Power6 to achieve speeds of between 4 and 5 gigahertz – more than double the performance of the next generation of Intel's Itanium chip, planned at less than 2GHz.
Bernie Myerson, chief technology officer of IBM's Systems and Technology group, said existing chip technology reached its physical limits four years ago in terms of doubling the number of transistors on a chip while reducing the amount of power needed to run them.
But techniques such as stretching and squeezing the silicon used, improving synchronisation at high speeds and taking a holistic approach to improving the chip architecture had enabled a breakthrough.
"There's nobody looking at anything like this. We have a more highly integrated chip that is multi-core and we are increasing the frequency – we are turning up both knobs at once when the industry is going the other way and turning [the frequency] knob down," Mr Myerson said.
Richard Doherty, analyst with Envisioneering, a consultancy, said IBM achieved frequencies of 6GHz in their labs.
"It's our belief that this is going to be the fastest computing chip and family in the world for some time.
"A lot of people will be surprised by this. It will cause a lot of companies to go back to the drawing board," he said.
IBM will make its disclosures about the Power6 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.
It unveiled its revolutionary Cell processor at the same conference a year ago, which will feature in Sony's PlayStation3 games console.
Great ... .what software will be using the new speeds?
Uh, oh, Apple's going back to IBM!
There’s some speculation that this cpu will be the general purpose CPU in all 3 server lines (z,p,i)
You can no longer judge a processor's performance by speed but this is fast.
It probably runs on 220V and requires its own chiller.
"Great ... .what software will be using the new speeds?"
- Don't know...but I do know for certain that the advanced scientific and engineering breakthrough wasn't accomplished by muslims. Nothing of importance rarely is.
IBM was purposely screwing Apple and holding them hostage by limiting supply. Chances are they wouldn't have delivered this new chip to Apple in sufficient quantities - and on time - even if Apple had stayed, nor if they tried to go back now.
Looks like Apple chose the wrong horse. And about MS, with the planned DMR on Vista, the 4 or 5 ghz chip will run like a 2 Ghz chip.
And I just bought two new computers for work......
I'm sure I will find it useful for:
1) Editing high definition video
2) Manipulating double-digit megapixel images
3) Compressing 7-channel audio
and
4) The number-crunching I do at work.
Large amounts of fast memory will also be useful for these tasks.
What, did you thing you had some kind of "Gotcha" question?
They ought to be able to run Word fairly successfully :-)
Word and PowerPointless will still be painful.
And designing nukes...
If you read the article, notice it mentions software as a necessity for the power, and probably performance gains. IBM's POWER chips are tied closely to the OS, which is something you can't really do for a desktop. For example, much of the POWER5's SMT is implemented in software, not hardware as Intel did with "hyperthreading."
This really is a server chip. We couldn't expect even a scaled-down desktop version like the PPC970 until quite a bit after this thing is in production.
;^P
[Methinks thou doth protest a wee bit too much]
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