FW: Exciting IBM pSeries Power6 News !!! (fwd)

Guys:

Thought some of you might be interested...

         --Arthur Corliss
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---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 12:54 PM
To: Valued IBM pSeries Customers
Subject: Exciting IBM pSeries Power6 News !!!

Dear Valued IBM pSeries Customer, here's some pretty spectacular news
from our Austin R&D Labs. We've got Power6 running in the Austin Labs on
multiple servers. Please let me know if you would like to learn more or
have any questions. Thanks!

New IBM chip breaks barriers to double speed
By Chris Nuttall in San Francisco Feb 7 2006 01:03

IBM
<http://mwprices.ft.com/custom/ft-com/quotechartnews.asp?FTSite=FTCOM&q=
IBM&searchtype&expanded=&countrycode=us&s2=us&symb=IBM&company=NEW> will
unveil a new processor on Tuesday that will be twice as fast as those of
competitors such as Sun, Intel and AMD when it appears in 2007,
according to the group.

IBM's Power6 chip is a radical departure from the trend among
microprocessor makers to produce more energy-efficient chips after their
race to increase speeds created overheating problems.

IBM said it had broken through energy and heat barriers with the Power6
to achieve speeds of between 4 and 5 gigahertz - more than double the
performance of the next generation of Intel's Itanium chip, planned at
less than 2GHz.

The processor will give IBM an edge in the high-end server market,
operating faster in the same "power envelope" as its rivals.

Bernie Myerson, chief technology officer of IBM's Systems and Technology
group, said existing chip technology reached its physical limits four
years ago in terms of doubling the number of transistors on a chip while
reducing the amount of power needed to run them.

But techniques such as stretching and squeezing the silicon used,
improving synchronisation at high speeds and taking a holistic approach
to improving the chip architecture had enabled a breakthrough.

"There's nobody looking at anything like this. We have a more highly
integrated chip that is multi-core and we are increasing the frequency -
we are turning up both knobs at once when the industry is going the
other way and turning [the frequency] knob down," Mr Myerson said.

Richard Doherty, analyst with Envisioneering, a consultancy, said IBM
achieved frequencies of 6GHz in their labs.

"It's our belief that this is going to be the fastest computing chip and
family in the world for some time.

"A lot of people will be surprised by this. It will cause a lot of
companies to go back to the drawing board," he said.

IBM will make its disclosures about the Power6 at the International
Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

It unveiled its revolutionary Cell processor at the same conference a
year ago, which will feature in Sony's PlayStation3 games console.
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Received on Tue Feb 14 13:14:55 2006