IBM just announced two new POWER6 systems, the IBM System p 520 and IBM System p 550. In essence, p 520 has up to 4 cores of a 4.2GHz POWER6 processor and up to 64GB memory, while the p 550 has up to 8 cores and up to 256GB memory. The two systems are sweet little systems, and I recommend checking them out.
Elisabeth Stahl has a good summary blog post on the leadership publishes submitted earlier this week for these new systems. I point to her blog since she nicely has all of the requisite disclaimers and pointers to the data points submitted to SPEC.org and with SAP this week. It takes a couple of weeks for the various review processes to complete, so it'll be easier to comment on these once they've been reviewed, approved, and published. I have found that Linux programmers like to see the published files and walk through the specific details. Show me.
The cool part is Linux on Power continues to be a parity player in the leadership performance metrics for POWER6 customers (in this case using examples for Linpack, SPEC CPU2006, SPECjbb2005, and SAP). There are summaries of some of the submitted bottom-line numbers for AIX and Linux for the p 520 and the p 550 on IBM's website.
There's a short paper which should be out soon that discusses the simple steps and software products that can be used on Linux on Power to achieve the best performance for POWER6 using Linux. It's based on similar publishes done last October and uses actual results that are published on the SPEC.org website.
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