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IBM Powers Up New Chip

Alexei Oreskovic

IBM(IBM Quote) unveiled a new microprocessor Monday, claiming advances in performance and power consumption for the high-end servers used by many corporations.

The new Power6 chip is the latest update to IBM's line of Power microprocessors, following the three-year-old Power5 generation of chips. The Power6 boasts a clock-speed of 4.7 gigahertz, which is twice as fast as its predecessor, according to IBM.

IBM says the chip offers this performance increase while consuming "nearly" the same amount of energy as the Power5 chip -- a factor that has become increasingly important as the data centers that many corporations rely on to run their business have driven up electricity bills.

The new chip will be available throughout IBM's line of System p and System i servers. The first machines boasting the Power6 chip, available in early June, will be the System p 570 servers which run the Unix operating system.

The Power6 features 790 million transistors, with circuits measuring 65 nanometers.

Notably, the Power6 features only two cores, or processing engines, within the chip. That's a slightly different approach from the current trend in the semiconductor industry, where companies are striving to boost processor performance without consuming excessive amounts of energy by cramming ever-increasing numbers of cores onto a chip.

Intel(INTC Quote) released a quad-core processor at the end of 2006 and will reportedly give details on forthcoming chips featuring hundreds of cores at an industry conference in San Jose, Calif., Monday.

IBM said the Power6 uses a variety of technological innovations to allow the two cores to run at higher speeds while keeping a lid on energy consumption. According to IBM, the Powe6 has upped the speed of the so-called pipeline stages which perform operations during each single cycle of clock time.

Certain circuits on the chip can also switch between high- and low-voltage modes and have been separated from less energy-efficient circuits, the company said.

Shares of IBM were off 0.8%, or 83 cents, at $107.16 in midday trading Monday.