IBM is breaking another world record with its latest microprocessor, POWER6. As the Big Blue claims, at 4.7 GHz, the dual-core POWER6 doubles the speed of the previous generation while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it.

The technology used to build POWER6 is state-of-the-art 65 nanometer process technology and IBM’s breakthrough is driven by a host of technical achievements scored during the five-year research and development effort to develop the POWER6 chip.

IBM developed 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. Also a dramatic improvement was introduced in the way instructions are executed inside the chip. 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.

“Like the victory of IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer 10 years ago this month, the debut of POWER6 processor-based systems proves that relentless innovation brings ‘impossible’ goals within reach,� said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president, IBM Systems and Technology Group. “The POWER6 processor forges blazing performance and energy conservation technologies into a single piece of silicon, driving unprecedented business value for our customers.�

IBM claims that The processor speed of the POWER6 chip is nearly three times faster than the latest HP Itanium processor that runs HP’s server line. The processor bandwidth of the POWER6 chip is 300 gigabytes per second, which means it  could download the entire iTunes catalog in about 60 seconds, 30 times faster than HP’s Itanium.

The POWER6 will be generally available within two weeks in a new midrange server, called the System p 570, that can support up to eight physical processor sockets, for a total of 16 cores. The p 570 will run IBM's AIX version of Unix as well as Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux, and it will be aimed at server consolidation or database and application server uses.