The IBM series of high performance CPUs is moving to the next level
with the Power6 and speeds in excess of 5 GHz. This was published
in the program guide for the International Solid State Circuits
Conference and reported at C|Net on Friday.
Modern CPUs have suffered from increased heat output as the clock speed has
increased. To deal with this, Intel and AMD have utilized modest clock speeds
but multiple cores to increase the computational output. However,
IBMis Brad McCredie, a fellow in IBMis System and Technology Group
has pointed out that adding more cores doesnit “scale the cache and memory bandwidth.”
Recall that the IBM PowerPC 970, Appleis “G5,” was the smaller, slightly less capable version of the IBM Power5. The next generation chip, the Power6 is expected to ship in 2007 and be used in IBMis p-series systems. Power output is expected to be modest, less than 100 W.
IBM, which has considerable expertise in high performance computing, has elected
to go back to the single core, high clock systems, having apparently figured out how
to manage the heat issues. However the computational, heat and cost issues that face
IBMis enterprise customers are very different that those faced by Appleis
MacBook customers. As a result, the high clock speeds obtained by IBM should not necessarily be taken as evidence that Apple made a mistake transitioning to Intel.