IBM are set to launch a new 8-processor system today which will be aimed at the budget UNIX market. Normally a server with such power could be sold for around $100,000 using traditional RISC chips but the new Power4 technology has allowed them to retail from between $29,995 and $129,995.
The new systems are clearly geared to compete with Sun"s UNIX servers which cost a similar amount, and the IBM offering has a higher clock speed than the systems on offer from Sun. The reason the Power4 allows cheaper systems to be developed is that each chip contains two cores and as a result these 8-processor systems only require 4 chips.
These systems are to be named the p650 and the actual chips are slight variances on the orginal Power4, called the Power 4+. These are manufactured using the 130-nm fabrication technique. With the price of systems like this dropping more reliable servers can be made available to companies which otherwise would have been priced out of the market.