The road ahead for IBM"s Power chip line is full of speed boosts with the Power5+ chip hitting 3.0GHz and its successor going well beyond that, The Reg can reveal. Another handy NDA document has fallen into our hands, laying out the roadmap for IBM"s Power5 and Power5+ processors along with some Power6 details. IBM has already struck fear in the hearts of its competitors with the dual-core Power4 chip and looks set to apply more pressure on rivals with the future processors.
The Power5 processor will first appear in 2004 at the heart of the Squadron family of servers. These systems will scale from 1 to 64 processors. IBM"s current large SMP - the p690 - only makes it up to 32 Power4 chips. The first Power5 chips will come in at 1.4GHz and make their way up to 2.0GHz before being replaced by the Power5+ chips. It"s here that things start heating up with the Power5+ said to run between 2.0GHz and 3.0GHz. With the Power5 family, IBM is looking to make a number of improvements. Of note, the company hopes to drive memory bandwidth to more than 800GB/s in an SMP, speed up buses and make it possible to run multiple partitions on a single CPU.