High End Power5+ System p5 Launch on July 25; System i5 Machines Possible, But Not Rumored

Published: July 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is getting ready to complete its roll out of the Power5+ processors in the System p5 sibling to the System i5 line on July 25.

While I am aware of some of the details of the System p5 announcements, I do not know if there will be a companion set of System i5 announcement either concurrent with or following the System p5 announcements. There have been no suggestions at the rumor mill that there will be more additions to the i5 line, although there are some good changes that IBM could make, for sure. Like a very low cost System i5 505 or 510 server, for instance.

IBM could also add the faster 2.1 GHz and 2.3 GHz Power5+ processors to the high-end System i5 595 machine as well, if there are customers who, as impossible as this may sound, have run out of gas on their 64-core 595 servers. Moving from the current 1.9 GHz multichip modules, which have eight cores on a single block with their L2 caches on each two cores and L3 caches in the module, to a 2.3 GHz MCM should raise performance by another 20 percent or so, and with large page memory support (which was already backcast into the existing pSeries 595 machines a few months ago and which was surely aimed at the System p5 595s, which are late to market by nearly a year), such an i5/OS machine could be quite powerful, indeed.

Anyway, if you want to get the lowdown on the forthcoming System p5 announcements, read this story, which IT Jungle posted last week.