On May 21, IBM unceremoniously released the worlds fastest chip in microprocessor history. Take a moment to soak that up. It was not an AMD or an Intel announcement, it was IBM. You know, the company that most thought was out of the consumer space forever. After all, they sold off the personal computer division to Lenovo. 

The new Power6 chip debuted at the lofty speed of 4.7GHz, well past the raw speed of any processor by its well known rivals. The chip is also dual core, and beyond those achievements, it is also 100% more power efficient.

It would be logical to think that the launch of something this momentous would have had the fanfare of say, Windows 95, with the Rolling Stones song, ‘Start Me Up’ once more heralding a fresh start and new thinking on the horizon. Unfortunately, since the chip is only appearing in servers at this point in time, none of the hoopla surrounding a consumer product was there. Hardly anyone knows that this 64-bit chip from IBM is more than 3 times faster than an Itanium processor from Intel, and has the power to download the entire iTunes catalog in just under one minute. The processing power is staggering, and that download speed indicates a figure 30 times faster than the Itanium processor previously referred to.

For those who think that, perhaps these benchmarks were specially chosen to accentuate the glow surrounding the announcement, several other standard benchmarks were run, and this chip owns them all.

To wit:

Benchmark Grand Slam

Demonstrating its remarkable versatility, the new IBM System p 570, running the POWER6 processor, claims the No.1 spots in the four most widely used performance benchmarks for Unix servers – SPECint2006 (measuring integer-calculating speed common in business applications), SPECfp2006 (measuring floating point-calculating speed required for scientific applications), SPECjbb2005 (measuring Java™ performance in business operations per second) and TPC-C (measuring transaction processing capability) (1). This is the first time that a single system has owned all four categories. The new System p 570 now holds 25 benchmark records across a broad portfolio of business and technical applications (5).

The performance leadership is largely attributed the system’s balanced design. Unlike competing servers, IBM succeeded in scaling the new server’s processor performance and system design (cache sizes and bandwidth) in a balanced way. The POWER6 chip has a total cache size of 8MB per chip – four times the POWER5 chip – to keep pace with the awesome processor bandwidth. By contrast, many other servers concentrate mainly on processor performance, at the expense of the server’s ability to feed data to the chip at a rate that takes advantage of the processor’s speed

The powers of this chip don’t stop with processor speed and amazing efficiency, as complete support for virtualization - darling of the reviewers and chipmakers - has been included.

Everyone has been congratulating Steve Jobs and Apple on their successful migration to the Intel platform, and what marketing genius this was. I don’t agree. It seems that Apple jumped ship just a bit too soon, leaving behind a chip that has the capability of making the CPU world a 3 company race once again, after VIA has become a non-factor. Without a company to highlight the uses of this chip in the PC arena, this might become the best kept secret of the new information age.

[There are rumors in the OpenSolaris/Nexenta camps that some companies are being approached for low volume runs of motherboards and glue chips to use this as a PC, but they remain rumors for now]

Tags: ibm, power6, 64bit computing, virtualization, p 570 server, itanium, intel