Eight Core Processors from IBM Hit the Market

The Power 7 processor was finally launched by IBM recently. The new processor chip has eight cores and each core can run four threads! What does that mean? It means that the new processor can handle 32 tasks at the same time which is four times the number of cores on the older Power 6 Chip. The General Manager of IBM’s Power Systems unit, Ross Mauri said, the new chip would run between 3.0 GHz & 4.14GHz. It is slated to come in four, six or eight cores.

The new Power 7 chip would quadruple the energy efficiency and will run Operating systems including enterprise Linux, and AIX offered by Red Hat and Suse. As the latest chip comes with a TurboCore Technology using which customers can crank up the speed of active cores for better performance.

The new Processor chip has a Unique Intelligent Energy technology that turns off sections of the system to save energy. Though nobody is aware of the price of these “world’s fastest processors”, it is clear that these are aimed for financial and electric industries that require servers with continuous uptime.

Industry analysts fear that this latest launch from IBM could kick off a new battle in the high-end microprocessor market where competing companies includes the likes of Itanium chip maker Intel and Sun Microsystems of the Sparc chip fame.