Power 5+ to Probably Ramp to 2.2 GHz in IBM OpenPower Servers

Published: February 7, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, IBM announced that it had put a new 2.2 GHz Power5+ processor into its System i5 (formerly iSeries) line of high-end midrange servers, and the expectation is that this chip will soon wind its way into the System p5 (formerly pSeries) line.

Last October, IBM delivered its first Power5+ chips in the p5 servers, including the 1.9 GHz dual-core module (DCM), which is based on a new, 90 nanometer chip process that allows IBM to speed the chip up compared to the 1.5 GHz and 1.65 GHz speeds of the Power5 chips that were launched for entry and midrange machines in the summer of 2004. With the System i5 announcements this week, IBM also put out a 2.2 GHz module that is used in the i5 570 machine. This server has two processor sockets, and each Power5 and Power5+ chip has two cores, so that makes the base i5 570 box a four-core server. Up to four basic i5 570 chasses can be lashed together through the "Squadron" chipset to make a 16-core box. IBM announced a quad-core module (QCM) running at 1.5 GHz last fall, but did not offer it in the System i5s, since it is aimed at high-performance and ultra-dense computing.

It seems likely that the Linux-based OpenPower server line--which can technically run AIX or i5/OS but is restricted from doing so by Big Blue-- will get this faster 2.2 GHz Power5+ chip soon. The odds also favor IBM extending the OpenPower server line, adding machines with more than four Power cores. Now that Linux scales well to eight and sometimes to 16 cores and some customers are standardizing on Linux and have no interest in buying a more expensive System p5 or System i5 machine, IBM really needs to do this to remain competitive with Opteron and Xeon boxes on the Linux front.

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