What is IBM Power6 CPU?

POWER6 is CPU with double frequency compared with POWER5. Frequency is 4-5 GHz and bandwidth of POWER5 with the same power envelope.

The new POWER6 are:

1. With capability to make Processor recovery
2. With capability effectively use energy
3. Uses new decimal Floating point principles.

IBM gives promise that first pSeries servers with POWER6 CPU will be available in June this year of 2007.

First available servers will be from series p590/595, respectively servers with 8 to 64 cores. In one socket there will be 4 cores.

What IBM says about temperature with such high frequencies.
Internal experiments shows, that temperature will not exceeds 85 degree of Celsius.
It can reached by special technology called "nap". In situations when CPU cycles are not required energy saving will be possible 30 - 35 percents. Even in loaded system energy saving and it means also thermal reduction will reach 10%.

POWERx and specially POWER6 CPU architecture are very experienced from IBM Mainframes of Z/Series and are very effective when it is used with Advanced Power Virtualisation feature.