IBM unleashes World's Fastest Chip

The POWER6 Chip: a Convention-Shattering Design

The POWER6 chip in the new IBM System p 570 server owns a number of industry “firsts.” It is the first UNIX microprocessor able to calculate decimal floating point arithmetic in hardware. Until now, calculations involving decimal numbers with floating decimal points were done using software. The built-in decimal floating point capability gives tremendous advantage to enterprises running complex tax, financial and ERP programs.

The POWER6 processor is built using IBM’s state-of-the-art 65 nanometer process technology. Coming at a time when some experts have predicted an end to Moore’s Law, which holds that processor speed doubles every 18 months, the IBM breakthrough is driven by a host of technical achievements scored during the five-year research and development effort to develop the POWER6 chip. These include:

* A dramatic improvement in the way instructions are executed inside the chip. IBM scientists increased chip performance by keeping static the number of pipeline stages – the chunks of operations that must be completed in a single cycle of clock time -- but making each stage faster, removing unnecessary work and doing more in parallel. As a result, execution time is cut in half or energy consumption is reduced.

* Separating circuits that can’t support low voltage operation onto their own power supply “rails,” allowing IBM to dramatically reduce power for the rest of the chip.

* Voltage/frequency “slewing,” enabling the chip to lower electricity consumption by up to 50 percent, with minimal performance impact.

* A new method of chip design that enables POWER6 to operate at low voltages, allowing the same chip to be used in low power blade environments as well as large, high-performance symmetric multiprocessing machines. The chip has configurable bandwidth, enabling customers to choose maximum performance or minimal cost.

The POWER6 chip includes additional techniques to conserve power and reduce heat generated by POWER6 processor-based servers. Processor clocks can be dynamically turned off when there is no useful work to be done and turned back on when there are instructions to be executed.

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