Get the presses and stop anything else that you’re doing right now. Get ready to drop your jaws until they meet your feet. IBM recently launched the world’s fastest micro-processor ever built. {Burst the Crackers and Beat the drum rolls}… the dual-core Power6 comes with a whopping frequency of 4.7 GHz. Intel is watching, and can’t do much.

According to the press release that we got the information from, the dual-core Power6 micro-processor is twice as fast as the yesteryear generation Power5 at 4.7 GHz, although it uses nearly just as much amount of electricity to run and cool itself. Also, the cache size of Power6, which is nearly 4 times that of Power5, stands at a total of 8 Mega bytes per processor.

This mean micro-processor is developed using state of the art 65 nanometer process technology of IBM. Apart from having the BIG 4.7 GHz frequency, it’s the first UNIX based micro-processor that can calculate decimal floating point arithmetic in any computer hardware ever built. The company says, “Until now, calculations involving decimal numbers with floating decimal points were done using software. The built-in decimal floating point capability gives tremendous advantage to enterprises running complex tax, financial and ERP programs”.

IBM even announced the all new ultra-powerful computer server, the p570, which is designed to take advantages of the powerful chip’s various breakthrough features like virtualization technology and energy conservation.

The company hopes that the Power6 micro-processor will become a rage in its target market, and is going to be a big hit with companies running complicated financial, tax and ERP programs. Also, the UNIX based mid-range server can support anywhere from 2 to 16 cores and is abundant with a host of power / energy saving features. Energy saving seems to have become the motto of their server development team these days, and they rock at that.

The press release also mentioned that “the new server is the first ever to hold all four major benchmark* speed records for business and technical performance”. [* Independent Performance Benchmarks for UNIX servers, as set by SPEC.org]

This baby has so much processor bandwidth that the entire iTunes catalogue can be downloaded in nearly a minute’s time, and that’s a fantastic 300 GB per second, which is faster than HP’s Itanium by nearly 30 times. Besides, this powerful machine offers three times the performance for every single core, as compared to the HP Superdome machine. This number comes into light because IBM and HP’s servers have always been compared across expert tables and the company testing centers.

Present at the announcement show which was held on the 21st of May this year, Bill Zeitler (Senior Vice President of the IBM Systems and Technology Group) said, “Like the victory of IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer 10 years ago this month, the debut of POWER6 processor-based systems proves that relentless innovation brings ‘impossible’ goals within reach”. He further added that “The POWER6 processor forges blazing performance and energy conservation technologies into a single piece of silicon, driving unprecedented business value for our customers”.

This new server from IBM holds a set of 4 benchmarks, for any supercomputer manufacturer to keep in mind, whether it’s for business or technical requirements. Besides, the server has achieved every speed record tested for and is the first of its kind in today’s age.

The Power6 also comes with a switch-around like features, which offers users the flexibility to either extract maximum performance from the chip or get reduced performance while ensuring a lot of energy savings, thanks to the configurable bandwidth that comes with it. The micro-processor is built for offering dynamic performance and has the capability to switch itself off when no important work is being done, thus resulting in less power use.

As if any of these powers weren’t enough, IBM’s new baby also happens to be the first to come with a software virtualization capability. What this means is that users now will be able to move virtual (live) machines between two physical UNIX servers in addition to offering continuous server availability. This technology which doesn’t need the servers or server partitions to be temporarily suspended by the system administrator is called as the Power6 Live Partition Mobility function. IBM mentioned that the software which helps enable this is presently in the Beta stage, and the release version is scheduled to be out in the later months this year.

IBM plans to target those customers who use HP, Dell and Sun servers, and claims that their product can save business organizations up to $100,000 every year which are now showing up in energy costs / bills. IBM calculates that the power, performance and reliability of 30 SunFire v890s can easily be circumscribed into a single IBM Power6 micro-processor. This has been made possible because of a unique chip design by the company which allows this mean machine to continue to function normally at even low voltages.