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POWER6 MICROPROCESSOR:

IBM has finally unveiled its new 4.7 GHz UNIX dual core mainframe Power6 microprocessor on 8th June, 2007 which it claims to be the fastest microprocessor made so far. It’s a microprocessor chip with 790 million transistors embedded in it. The most crucial aspect is roughly the same power usage (actually less) as it’s Power5 (slower) microprocessor series and providing double the speed than its previous Power5 microprocessors. Its less power usage has been possible due to the reduction in the size of silicon used.

Power6 microprocessor has been build using the IBM’s state-of-art 65 nanometer process technology. This dual core design has L1, L2, and L3 cache. It also has a two stage pipeline which enables either two independent 32-bit reads or one 64-bit read in a one clock cycle. Also each core is provided with two integer units, two binary floating point units and a decimal floating point unit. In these Power6 chips, conversion between decimal and binary and performing decimal computations can be achieved through 50 new floating point instructions, a unique feature enhancing its processing capabilities. The chip runs multiple jobs in parallel by removing the unnecessary work. This makes each stage work faster.

This unique chip has the capability of handling the calculations of decimal floating point arithmetic in hardware which till now was being performed in software. It has a gated clock where the clock supply to the chip can be cut off when the chip is not in use and automatically provided when the chip comes in use. This helps in saving power. Apart from it Power6 chips are providing higher bandwidth (about 300 gigabytes per second) than its previous processors. These also can give accurate results of temperature, power and performance. In terms of cache size, Power6 offers 8MB per chip which is approximately four times the Power5 chip and helps in maintaining good pace with a large bandwidth.

These chips maintain their cool by reducing the number of instructions and thus preventing breakdown. In terms of backup and fault tolerant capabilities also Power6 has excelled where it can easily recover from hard and soft errors by performing instructions retry and providing increased reliability.

IBM system i-570 and system p-570 are powered by these power6 chips providing speeds of 3.5, 4.2 and 4.7GHz and configured up to 16 cores. Launching of power6 microprocessor gave IBM a chance to compete in the UNIX market especially with SUN Microsystems SPARC/Solaris offering.

Thus definitely these fast and reliable microprocessors provide add on processing speed advantages with minimum power requirements and maintenance to the professionals.