IBM has carved out a renegade path for the upcoming Power6 processor, opting to crank the chip's clock speed much higher while rivals shy away from major gigahertz boosts with their products.
The Power6 chip will run between 4GHz and 5GHz, and has been shown to hum away at 6GHz in the lab. IBM reckons that some process technology breakthroughs have allowed it to kick the frequency higher while still keeping heat and power consumption issues under control. All told, IBM claims that Power6 will be twice as fast as competing server processors from Intel, AMD and Sun Microsystems.
"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," Bernie Myerson, chief technology officer in IBM's systems group, told the Financial Times.
Read the rest here
No comments:
Post a Comment