RSSIBM Aims to Fix Chip Issues with Power6
By Ed Oswald | Published February 7, 2006, 12:07 PM
IBM's upcoming Power6 line will aim to address some of the problems of its predecessor, while running at speeds well above that of today's processors. The Power5 line, also known as the G5 chip included in Apple's iMac and PowerMac desktops, has suffered from power and heat dissipation issues.
These issues were enough for Apple to drop IBM's Power architecture in favor of cooler and more power efficient Intel chips at last years Worldwide Developer Conference. Since then, the iMac and Apple's high-end laptop, the MacBook Pro, have made the transition, with the rest of the line expected to be all Intel by year's end.
The new processor would also reverse a recent trend in the industry of adding additional cores yet decreasing the clock speed on each core in order to reduce power consumption and heat, yet attain a performance boost.
Due to this, "dual-core" does not necessarily equate to "double the speed."
Power6 will be a multi-core chip and is a fundamental redesign from the ground up over previous Power processors, according to IBM. The chip will be designed to run in high-end UNIX servers. A Power6 chip would run in the 4 to 5 gigahertz range.
IBM says that even at such a high speed, it would use less power than even some desktop chips. The company hopes to have the chip on the market by the beginning of next year.
The G5 is based on the POWER4 acrhitecture, not the POWER5...
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|Just confirmed this on IBM.com. Maybe someone should update the article.
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|A little too late..
lol
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|I find it funny that IBM JUST now creates a new processor design. Now that they have to deal with the very real threat of losing a huge customer, the G5 suddenly becomes fix-able.
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|Maybe they don't like Apple? :P
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|Apple wasn't a very big customer, IBM had bigger sales from embedded solutions.
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|Wouldn't it be funny if PC's went to IBM now that Apple went to Intel?
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|hmm, pc should use the cell, i want the power of ps3 in my box:)
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|The Cell may never be available in the PC, more so used in Robotics, Server, and Graphics Rendering. But MAYBE :)
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|Maybe Apple jumped ship too quickly.
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|Maybe IBM took too long to fix the heat problem with the Power5 chip. There is absolutely no reason for a CPU to require water cooling. The heat problem is also something IBM could have fixed a very long time ago on the Power5. It probably won't be too long before Intel or AMD has a CPU that will easily beat the Power6.
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|I think the Cell is actually capable of having multiple processor designs - one for each core. Allowing better support for other operating systems and, say a GPU included in the overall CPU.... at least that's what my understanding is...
Now if this new chip design ends up in the Cell (from the article) then we can definately see the Cell being the best chip around for a Laptop or Desktop machine. Man, I could really use the speed.
Was that 4 to 5 Ghz per cpu core? That would be incredible!
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