The IBM Power6 architecture has been under development for five years now and it has now finally been unveiled in the form of a 4.7GHz processor inside of the updated System p 570. The new architecture offers four times the cache (8MB), twice the performance of Power5 and consumes half as much power. The System p 570 puts the processor in its native environment where it can fully utilize the processor bandwidth at 300GB/s and has at the same time managed to claim the number one spot with all four UNIX tests; SPECint2006, SPECfp2006, SPECjbb2005 and TPC-C. The new processor offers up to three times the performance current Itanium processors, all according to IBM.
More information about the new processor and some of the architectural news can be found in IBM’s press release. Below you can see a die shot of a Power6 processor.
