New rumours about Power6

TPM of the Unix Guardian has some new rumours about the upcoming Power 6:

One source says the launch is in May with initial shipments in June, and said further that his IBM salesman said the Power6 clocks would hit 4.5 GHz in these machines. (Obviously, they can also be lower.)

Such a timeframe would really make sense. The upcoming Rock and SPARC64 VII processors set an timeframe, that´s not so so large to have an annoucement in 2008. Rumours about Rock suggest a very successful project progression. Intel and HP won´t stand still with their Itanium gear. At the moment, Power is a little bit in the defense on the performance side, despite of being the self proclaimed king of the performance since Power4 time. So from marketing side, the best moment for the announcement would would be in the next few months, although i strongly believe that the announcement of N2 will dent away much of the theater thunder. PS: Self proclaimed as many of the statements were based on overengineered benchmarks and i saw too many customer situations, where Sun gear won against IBM gear in real application benchmarks despite of beeing the slowest in artificial benchmarks. And well, at the moment an Itanium system is the king of SAP SD, hope that this will change soon with a M9000-64. IBM needs some new benchmark wins beside of TPC-C ;)