International Business Machines Corp updated its line of small servers running Intel Corp chips as soon as the biggest computer-chip maker introduced the fast Itanium processor last month.
IBM's heart was probably elsewhere. The largest computer maker's computing prowess and wider profit margins reside instead in heavy-duty servers running IBM's own high-performance chips.
IBM will make a major processor upgrade later this year with a chip called Power4 and new servers code-named "Regatta." As server makers work to leapfrog rivals by adding faster and more powerful chips, IBM's Power4 may represent a larger-than-usual advance, some analysts say. IBM has devoted almost four years of work by hundreds of engineers to Power4's development, borrowed ideas from mainframe computers and changed the chip's design and surrounding connection pod, or "packaging," to boost performance.
"It's just an incredibly hefty processor," analyst Kevin Krewell, of Sunnyvale, California-based MicroDesign Resources, said in an interview. "Power4 is going to have an advantage [over rivals] for a good part of 2002."
IBM says Power4 will be out in the fourth quarter
IBM will use Power4 in two of its four major server lines and has an agreement to let Hitachi Ltd. develop and use future versions of the chip in Hitachi servers.
The central design aim of the Power4 is to move as much data to the largest number of processors in the shortest time possible.
Instead of placing a single processor on a tiny slab of silicon, IBM has placed two processors, side by side, on one chip.
To speed data flow, the two processors will share a single internal data-memory cache, eliminating the need to retrieve some data from outside of the chip. IBM managed to pack 174 million transistors on the chip, four to five times current norms for the top server chips.
Power4 is expected to feature the highest bandwidth of any existing chip -- that is, the largest amount of data moving in and out of the processors.
From processor to memory, it can move the equivalent of 20 full-length digital movies in one second, IBM says. That's 12 times the data-transfer rate of its current Power3 chip. IBM says Power4's speed will exceed 1 billion cycles per second, or 1 gigahertz, compared with 800 megahertz for Itanium and 900 for UltraSparc III, for example. For servers, speed in processing is considered less important than bandwidth.
In addition, because the dual processors on the same chip will share a memory cache, connections to external caches are minimized, enhancing speed and functionality.
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