From PC World earlier this week:
…IBM Corp. released its Power6 processor on Monday, its fastest chip yet for high-end servers. The chip runs at double the speed of its Power5 line, but uses the same amount of power.
…The Power6 is a dual-core processor that runs at 4.7GHz. Those two cores use symmetric multithreading (SMT) technology that allows them to appear as four cores, each of which can execute instruction threads. It means that heavy processing, such that involved in airplane design or automotive crash simulations, can occur much faster.
IBM claims the Power6 chip is three times faster than the Itanium processor that HP uses in its Superdome servers and has a bandwidth 30 times greater, at 300G bytes per second.
Power6 is IBM’s first chip that does decimal math in hardware, possibly giving it index calculation advantages over other offerings (for fast database traversal), and of course IBM is claiming the obligatory “green” cred for the chip.
According to The Register,
customers can purchase the p 570 in volume with 3.5GHz, 4.2GHz and 4.7GHz chips, starting June 8.