IBM has launched its mighty POWER6 server processor. According to the press release, the 4,7GHz dual core POWER6 delivers twice the performance of its predecessor at about the same power consumption.

The new chip is a 65 nanometre, 64 bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7 GHz and boasts eight megabytes of on chip Level 2 cache. The processor bandwidth of the POWER6 chip is around 300 gigabytes per second, and Big Blue claims the new beast "is the first ever to hold all four major benchmark speed records for business and technical performance".

IBM's new System p 570 servers use the new chip and claim a bunch benchmark records, 25 to be exact, most notably the four most widely used performance benchmarks for Unix servers: SPECint2006, SPECfp2006, SPECjbb2005 and TPC-C. Oh yeah, they look nice too.

More here.