David Kanter has just written an article on IBM’s eCLipz project, the upcoming POWER6 MPU and its performance characteristics. The eCLipz project is aimed at sharing hardware between IBM’s UNIX, OS/400 and mainframe servers; the POWER6 is just one element of this project. The article discusses the microarchitecture of IBM’s POWER6 which is due out in 2007, and provides performance estimates for SPEC CPU 2000.
I’m working on these kind of systems for a while now but do’t think that financial institutions are ready to try some of this “open source” stuff. Thats why IBM still has such a stable base of customers, they want protection – ON PAPER!