He reported that a radical new microarchitecture, a much faster, more powerful microprocessor, and bullet-proof system design would be needed to do the job. Lund, who had been working on IBM mainframe systems at the time, was asked to assess what IBM needed to do to gain the lead in the UNIX systems segment. “Back in 1996, we ranked fifth out of five companies in the UNIX segment,” says Vijay Lund, now vice president of Cross-IBM Offerings in IBM’s Software Group. Jeopardy!, was built on POWER7 technology. Watson, the natural-language speaking computer which appeared as a contestant on the American television quiz show ®-became the heart of IBM’s current line of industry-leading IBM Power Systems™ and Power Systems Express computers used by large and midsize companies alike. Kevin Krewell, analyst at In-Stat/MDR, said of the award for the POWER4 architecture, “The scores lead all other server processors by a significant margin.” Industry analyst Brad Day of Giga Information Group said at the time: “IBM is getting very aggressive, and this server is a game changer.” Microprocessor research company Cahners In-Stat/MDR (MicroDesign Resources) awarded the new POWER4-based system its Analysts’ Choice Award for Best Workstation/Server Processor of 2001. Computing business magazineĮWeek wrote: “The newly designed 1GHz Power4 represents a tremendous leap over its predecessor, the 450MHz Power3.” ® server called IBM Regatta, more than doubled the performance standard at half the price of the nearest competitor. The first new system introduced with POWER4, an IBM eServer

® POWER4, combined the best of commercial, scientific and high-performance computing in a single design.

More of a new system than a new chip, their invention, called At the same time they developed an entirely new computer architecture. To meet that lofty goal, they successfully put two high-performance microprocessor cores on a single silicon chip-an industry first. They intended to leapfrog competitors such as Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation and HP with an entirely new system, one that would offer twice the performance at half the cost.

Computer cpu history