IBM IS facing off against Itanium with by putting its Power6 chips on its System P entry level mid range boxes. Power6 now runs for the first time on the entry level System P 520 Express.

It has also made an entry level virtualisation move pushing something called PowerVMExpress which runs on AIX, Linux and i5/OS.

The firm is claiming a lead over Intel: “While competitive virtualisation offerings in the industry are limited to supporting Intel processor-based servers, IBM's leadership innovation with the POWER6 microprocessor and PowerVM virtualisation software enables customers to partition below the processor level to one-tenth of the processor.”

So there. µ