Caution! Incoming benchmarketing in sight.

I knew it … i knew it right from the start. Either you have performance or you have power efficiency. I predict something additional for 2007: Massive Benchmarketing from IBM. We will see fast Power6 processors and we will see powerefficent Power6 processors. But not both. Source of my prediction? This blog entry of Steven Shankland:

For servers, IBM has said its Power6 processor, due to ship in servers in 2007, will run between 4GHz and 5GHz. But in the ISSCC program, Big Blue said the chip's clock will tick at a rate "over 5GHz in high-performance applications." In addition, the chip "consumes under 100 watts in power-sensitive applications," a power range comparable to mainstream 95-watt AMD Opteron chips and 80-watt Intel Xeon chips.

I assume, they didn´t solved the heat problem of processores. They simply ignore it. You can call it supported overclocking. Well, a have an inkling, that we will see the benchmarks with the highest clocking, hand selected Power6 with absurd prices or absurd leadtime to prevent customers from buying them. The normal customers will only see the normal frequency parts. Hey, at the end it´s the same game like in x86. Or do you really know someone who uses the latest CPUs money can buy. These processors are made for press releases.