One of the most popular pictures spread around the Net lately has been a picture from Microprocessor Forum 2003. The picture is somewhat misleading as the IBM POWER5 surely isn’t a “microprocessor”. As a matter of fact, the word processor is a wrong word since this is a chip with multiple CPU cores.
The IBM POWER5 chip measures almost a square decimeter, 95 x 95 mm. The MCM chip (multichip module) consists of 4 IBM POWER5 chips which in their turn consist of two CPU cores each, resulting in a total of 8 cores. Apart from the 8 cores, the chip has a total cache of 144 MB(!) since every POWER5 chip is equipped with a 1.92 MB L2 cache each and a 32 MB L3 cache. IBM POWER5 also has an integrated memory controller which makes the chip even more complex.
Each chip consists of 276 million transistors; a lot more than a standard-performing computer. The primary market for the POWER5 is UNIX servers where SUN and HP are large actors.
A pretty cute little thing, huh?
Source: The Inqurier, Xbitlabs.
