Going the energy efficiency route usually means making a few sacrifices along the way. Big Blue is telling data center operators to sacrifice nothing.

IBM's homegrown Power processor line is taking its silicon to new heights -- 4.7 GHz for a dual-core, 65 nm, 790 million transistor chip to be exact -- and offering double processing power of its Power5 predecessor without increasing power consumption. In practical terms, this means that Power6 servers, like the upcoming System p 570, will cost less to operate. IBM envisions 6-figure yearly savings for a rack full of the Power6 machines:

IBM calculates that 30 SunFire v890s can be consolidated into a single rack of the new IBM machine, saving more than $100,000 per year on energy costs.

This is achieved by a couple of chip design innovations:

• Separating circuits that can’t support low voltage operation onto their own power supply “rails,” allowing IBM to dramatically reduce power for the rest of the chip.

• Voltage/frequency “slewing,” enabling the chip to lower electricity consumption by up to 50 percent, with minimal performance impact.

• A new method of chip design that enables POWER6 to operate at low voltages, allowing the same chip to be used in low power blade environments as well as large, high-performance symmetric multiprocessing machines. The chip has configurable bandwidth, enabling customers to choose maximum performance or minimal cost.
  

It's also toppling computing records, which comes as no surprise if you happen to keep an eye on the Top500. They also tout the chip's generous, slurp-the-entire-iTunes-catalog-in-a-minute bandwidth of 300 gigabytes per second. Well, that's a handy statistic, but what they really meant to say is that it's 30 times the bandwidth of HP's Itanium. Ouch!

Nothing like some juicy sniping to add drama to IT.