IBM Power6 set to be Unix speed king

Big Blue servers hit 4.7GHz without sucking more power

IBM issued a tough challenge to HP and Sun at the global launch of its Power6 processor in London, detailing an impressive specification and benchmarks while staying within the same power envelope as the previous Power generation.

The dual-core Power6 chip will run at speeds up to 4.7GHz, a rate that is towards the upper end of expectations and twice the clock speed of the Power5. IBM said it already has 6GHz chips running in its labs so, together with the latest 65-nanometre manufacturing process IBM is using, headroom for faster speeds should be available. Server configurations up to eight-way, with 16 cores, will be generally available within two weeks.

To balance the system, Power6 has enormous processor bandwidth at 300 gigabytes per second and up to 8MB RAM caches on every chip. For now at least, the architecture will be enough to give IBM the speed crown across many key benchmarks and present an attractive target system for consolidation and virtualisation projects.

IBM is also following the trend of maintaining the power ceiling of previous-generation systems, in order to combat power, cooling and environmental issues. Power6 chips also contain power-down features that can be set to kick in when systems are idle.

Bill Zeitler, group executive of IBM’s systems and technology group, acknowledged that raw speed is no longer the primary consideration for buyers.

“The crisis datacentre managers are facing today isn’t about performance,” he said.

Ross Mauri, IBM general manager for System p, said Power6 systems will be priced low to jemmy buyers away from Unix rivals and continue IBM’s growth in market share. However, while many observers paint the picture of Unix fading in favour of Linux clusters and grids, Mauri said that Unix remains a critical, and only slightly diminishing, market.

“People always want to project the world as being one way and grids will play an important role for compute-intensive distributed workloads and processor cycle scavenging, but [low-cost servers running on grids] is never going to be a panacea,” he said.

Mauri’s point is supported by the data.

Server revenues are booming in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. In particular, analyst IDC noted, mid-range servers “are going through a significant recovery”, up 15 percent year on year, representing the fastest growth rate of all server types.

However, IDC analyst Nathaniel Martinez said that the mid-range and high-end Unix market is boiling down.

“Sun has made quite a comeback in recent quarters but mostly at the low end,” said Nathaniel Martinez, an IDC programme manager. “At the mid-range and high-end it’s going to be between IBM and HP.”

Power6 servers will run IBM’s AIX 5.2 and 5.3 versions of Unix but also plans a complementary release of AIX 6 for November this year. The release will support the Power6 ability to move applications across servers without powering down. It will also support concurrent updates, sport a new administration console and, for the first time, the release will be offered as an open beta from July.

IBM’s Mauri also gave a hint at what to expect for Power7, due by the end of the decade, saying IBM is examining building in accelerators for tasks such as Java, XML or cryptography processing that currently occupy dedicated servers.