The Power6 chip operates at 5 GHz

IBM said it is adopting new production methods to enable processing equipment for Power6 servers to run twice as fast as it does today but still ensure the temperature requirements.

According to Bernard Meyerson, IBM's technical director, they not only shrink the size of transistors, but also change the way silicon works when insulating layers below a silicon layer of about 500 atoms. .

Those improvements made Power6, manufactured using 65-nm technology, and are expected to be available in mid-2007, reaching speeds of 4 - 5 GHz. IBM claims Power6 will compete directly with products from rivals like Intel, AMD and Sun Microsystems.

As soon as Intel introduced 90 nm technology in 2003, it was found to cause more serious energy losses than previous production methods, causing the chip to radiate heat even when they were not running at full capacity. One of the remedies is to integrate 2 processing cores on a single chip and reduce the operating clock to increase operating capacity as well as avoid problems due to high temperatures. In contrast, Power6 was built to operate at an unprecedented high clock rate but still consume power efficiently.

Currently, Intel is also working on two new manufacturing techniques and designs to reduce power consumption on the system board. The first method provides the voltage for both the CPU and the cache, and the second will integrate the voltage regulator on the transistors.