ServerWatch: IBM's Regatta Sets Sail

"The cornerstone of the p690 is IBM's Power4 microprocessor. The "server on a chip" contains two one-GHz-plus processors, a high-bandwidth system switch, a large memory cache, and I/O capabilities. The server was designed this way to conserve energy and dramatically outperform other servers that have more than twice as many processors. The Power4 processor pumps data between the memory cache and the processor at nearly 125 gigabytes per second, or the equivalent of moving 25 full-length DVD movies in a single second.

The p690's palm-sized, eight-processor, multichip module has the equivalent processing power found in the larger system boards of other high-end servers. These ultra-dense building blocks are designed to contribute to the server's lower cost of ownership by providing more computing power in less floor space while consuming less power than other systems.

The p690 can operate as a single large server or be partitioned into as many as 16 "virtual" servers, running any combination of the AIX 5L and Linux. These virtual servers differ from the more common "hard" partitions that require at least four chips. The p690 is also designed to dynamically reconfigure partitions to meet changing workload demands without being taken offline."