IBM's new Power 5 chips based on SOI and copper interconnects.

IBM is to show off a range of servers using its Power 5 CPUs, according to US reports. The eServer i5 series using the Power 5 chip are being touted as 40% faster than machines using the previous Power family. The machines will run OS/400 but also have support for both Linux and Windows, according to a press release quoted on US wires. Machines could be available as soon as the beginning of June .

IBM's Power 5 processor is about four times more powerful than the last generation of chips. The new Power5 is a 130-nm chip, based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and copper interconnects. The Power5 chip has 276 million transistors, compared to 174 million in the previous processor, dubbed the Power4.
The Power5 is 389-mm2 device that contains 2,313 signal I/Os and 3,057 power I/Os. The chip is being produced in IBM's 300-mm manufacturing facility in East Fishkill.

The IBM eServer i5 will be the first IBM product to be enabled by the Power5 chip. Each dual chip module (DCM) in the eServer i5 contains one Power5 chip and one L3 cache device. An evolution of IBM's Power4/Power4+ processor design, Power5 adds simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), which transforms a single processor into two processors. A Power5 system will eventually be able to support up to 64 real processors, which can look like 128 processors to the software.

Source:
www.ibm.com
www.siliconstrategies.com
www.theinquirer.net