IBM’s Power6 looms large
AMDs Barcelona CPU is loaded with invented here innovation. It is also inspired by IBMs Power architecture. IBMs newest Power CPU, Power6, is due mid-year, along with quad-core processors from Intel and AMD. And while x86 will get more headlines in IT publications, Power6 is arguably more deserving.
With Power6, what strikes you first is the clock speed: 5GHz. Power6 builds on a concept that Intel (unwisely) sidelined: SMT (symmetric multithreading). Each of Power6s two cores is blessed with plenty of cache: 128KB of Level 1, 4MB of Level 2, and a share of up to 32MB of on-chip Level 3. Power6 has room for up to 1,024 hardware-managed partitions, IBMs term for virtual machines. Memory segments are locked with keys to make one partitions memory entirely inaccessible to malicious software, and memory can be reallocated among partitions both to improve utilization and to work around memory errors.
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