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4.7GHz IBM Power6 Spotted

Posted by kdawson on from the more-power-to-ya dept.

Ilgaz notes that The Register has posted benchmark results from Oracle 11i running on four 4.7GHz Power6 chips. Quoting: "The speedy chips confirm IBM's boasting that Power6 would arrive near 5GHz. They also show that IBM's customers have a lot to look forward to in terms of raw performance." Rumor has it that the Power6 chips will be announced on Tuesday.

3 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Did Apple make a mistake? by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Power6 sounds like it's going to be pretty damn cool - Perhaps Apple made a mistake jumping to intel so soon...

    *sighs* I for one yearn for the days of smugly ending any performance argument with some PC user with "Well, we've got Altivec & Altivec is magic."

    --
    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    1. Re:Did Apple make a mistake? by mrchaotica · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What I don't understand is, since Mac software has to be Universal nowadays anyway, why Apple doesn't just permanently keep its lineup as a mix of PPC and x86, picking whichever chip suits the particular machine they're designing at the time? Power6 Xserves along side Core 2 laptops... it sounds good to me!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  2. Re:OS X Server = PPC/Intel, OS X = Intel by Amiga+Trombone · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think that you basically mentioned the only real place where there's a market for PPC: on servers. Although I've always been a big fan of the Power architecture (I have a dual-G5 spaceheater sitting under my desk that I'm writing this on, right now), I don't think that offering G5 PowerMacs along side Intel PowerMacs would really do anything besides confuse customers and potentially make the platform less appealing for developers who don't realize how easy Universal code is to produce. So I think that's a non-starter.

    I'd agree with that assessment. Also, consider that desktop/laptop CPU's have different requirements than server CPU's. One of the reasons Apple dumped PPC was that IBM wasn't earning enough on chips optimized for desktops to invest in the necessary R&D to keep them competitive with x86.

    That is not an issue with servers, however, Power6 is already optimized for that purpose. Apple could probably offer a very attractive XServe indeed based on that chip. It would give them an offering that would outperform anything based on x86, making OS X a more attractive and versatile platform in general. I'd like to see them go for it.