“The Power4 was designed as a server chip for very expensive
hardware. But IBM executives say the new line might ultimately have
a greater impact on personal computing than recently announced 1GHz
desktop PC chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp.,
which last week announced their new entries….”
“IBM’s Power4 is unique in that it can offer multiprocessing
from the confines of a single chip. Power4 chips will combine two
processors on a single die, which is the slab of silicon on which
the processor is built. Power4 is also a 64-bit chip, meaning it
processes data in 64-bit chunks, as opposed to most desktop chips,
which tackle data in 32-bit chunks….”
“Power4 is on schedule to ship in the second half of next
year in IBM’s RS/6000 Unix servers and its AS/400 servers for small
and medium-size businesses running Unix or Linux. Early
versions of the chip have their processor cores running at 1GHz
each. However, analysts expect the chip to debut at 1.1GHz and
scale to 2GHz on a 0.13-micron process.”