IBM are set to launch a new 8-processor system today which will be aimed at the budget UNIX market. Normally a server with such power could be sold for around $100,000 using traditional RISC chips but the new Power4 technology has allowed them to retail from between $29,995 and $129,995.
The new systems are clearly geared to compete with Sun's UNIX servers which cost a similar amount, and the IBM offering has a higher clock speed than the systems on offer from Sun. The reason the Power4 allows cheaper systems to be developed is that each chip contains two cores and as a result these 8-processor systems only require 4 chips.
These systems are to be named the p650 and the actual chips are slight variances on the orginal Power4, called the Power 4+. These are manufactured using the 130-nm fabrication technique. With the price of systems like this dropping more reliable servers can be made available to companies which otherwise would have been priced out of the market.
News source: C|Net News.com
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