In May, 2007, IBM announced the availability of its next generation Power6 processor and the System p570, its first server to use that technology. This new version of IBM’s proprietary Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) shows transaction processing benchmark results that surpass the competition from Sun (with their SPARC processors) and HP (with Itanium). IBM promises to incorporate the Power6 processor into the full line of System i and System p servers, including the BladeCenter processor line.

Build It Yourself

The System p570 can run up to 16 Power6 cores in a single integrated environment. The rack-mount p570 server is based on 4U building blocks, with each chassis supporting up to four cores. Adding additional blocks (up to the maximum of four) can be done without disrupting the operations of existing blocks.