Power 6 pegged for 5GHz+

INTERESTING sleuthing over at news.com where Stephen Shankland has been peering at plans for the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The scoop: IBM's Power6 is now expected to ship with over 5GHz clock speeds.

As Shankland has said, Power6 had been pegged in the 4-5GHz range but documents now suggest numbers north of 5GHz. Of course, we all know clock speeds are far from being the be-all and end-all of processor performance but the Power architecture has taken plenty of knocks in the past for not keeping up, most notably from Steve Jobs. Way back in 2003, Jobs promised hard-core Apple folks that the IBM chips would be at 3GHz within 12 months. The failure to hit that spot is seen by some as a contributory factor to the eventual Intel switch. µ