IBM Plans Power6 Blades for Next Year

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Dec 2006 23:03 UTC

Today, IBM's blade servers are available with the company's PowerPC 970 processors. But the Power6 will replace those lower-end sibling in blade servers, Tim Doughtery, IBM's BladeCenter strategist, said in an interview Wednesday. The first Power6 servers are slated for delivery mid-2007, and the Power6 blades will arrive 'close to when we bring Power6 to the market', he added.

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Ok, slightly off topic.....

by Phloptical (3.52) on Thu 7th Dec 2006 00:04 UTC

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2006-10-10
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Is Power6 a "G5" style CPU, which I believe was Power5, right? If it is, can you then run OS X for PPC on it?

Not that anyone would, realistically....well maybe somebody would, just for kicks. That would probably be an expensive test.

Just wondering.

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RE: Ok, slightly off topic.....

by judgen (3.56) on Thu 7th Dec 2006 00:49 UTC in reply to "Ok, slightly off topic....."

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2006-07-12
Fans: 6

yeah youre off topic allright G5=Power4 or Power4 with extensions. Power5 Has still not been used in any mac.

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RE: Ok, slightly off topic.....

by gelosilente (1.28) on Thu 7th Dec 2006 09:07 UTC in reply to "Ok, slightly off topic....."

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2006-08-13
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the g5 (ppc970) was a power4 derivate, but all power and powerpc processors are binary compatible, so you can install os x on it (you should have the right driver too, i suppose)

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RE: Ok, slightly off topic.....

by viton (2.04) on Thu 7th Dec 2006 12:10 UTC in reply to "Ok, slightly off topic....."

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2005-08-09
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Yes, Power6 is compatible with "G5" (VMX, new instructions etc)
But "G5" is not a Power5, it is ppc970 =)
Power5 cpu is probably more expensive than the whole Mac G5.

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RE[2]: Ok, slightly off topic.....

by lopisaur (2.64) on Thu 7th Dec 2006 17:32 UTC in reply to "RE: Ok, slightly off topic....."

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2006-02-27
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The PowerPC is actually a subset of IBM's POWER Platform (yeah, that's how they're spelled).
Not sure if the POWER6 or the 5+ support AltiVec, but I don't think anyone ever tried running OS X on the thing. Besides, AIX rocks...

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RE: Ok, slightly off topic.....

by Wes Felter (2.76) on Thu 7th Dec 2006 02:30 UTC

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2005-11-15
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Power is PowerPC, but OS X would need modifications to run on the Power Hypervisor and would also need drivers for System p devices if you wanted to actually run it on a Power6 server. So no, you can't really run OS X on it.

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