IBM Corp.'s ambitious Austin-based Power4 processor project scored two big wins last week: It won a technical award from a leading consulting firm and it announced that it has manufactured its first working samples of the chip.

IBM, which has publicly said the new chip is crucial to much of its future computer hardware business, has begun testing samples from the complex device, which has 170 million transistors on it, or more than five times as many as today's leading processors. After extensive testing, the chip will show up in IBM RS/6000 server computers in the second half of 2001.

"The Power4 has a truly awesome collection of new technology that IBM has brought together," said analyst Keith Diefendorff with Micro Design Resources, whose company gave the chip its 1999 technology award. "The chip has the most potential to really improve the performance of future computers."  The analyst noted, however, that technical excellence is not always the main factor in commercial success for processors.

The IBM chip was evaluated against five other advanced chip projects: Intel Corp.'s Itanium; Compaq Computer Corp.'s Alpha; Sun Microsystems' MAJC; HAL Computer Systems' Sparc 64 V; and Sony/Toshiba's Emotion Engine.

The 64-bit Power4 chip, which is designed to operate at speeds of 1 gigahertz and higher, is really two high-performance processors on one piece of silicon, linked to an innovative cache memory system that can deliver enormous amounts of information -- 100 gigabytes -- every second.

The project is IBM's most ambitious ever for a chip; it involves several hundred designers in Austin and other IBM sites. The chip will be made by IBM in East Fishkill, N.Y., and Burlington, Vt.  IBM previously had fabricated key sections of the chip, but recently it began testing working samples of the design.

"The chip is operating just as we expected it to," said Mark Papermaster, director of Power3 and Power4 design teams in Austin. Because the chip will go in computers handling "mission critical" computing tasks for business and scientific users, it will undergo far more lengthy testing and evaluation than would a typical processor. The latest two milestones are big ones toward finishing the chip and handing it over to computer systems engineers.

The team has had several celebratory parties as goals have been met and Papermaster said it may be time for another.
"This team is proud," he said. "They have been hitting on all cylinders at each step and they know it."

You may contact Kirk Ladendorf at kladendorf@statesman.com or 445-3622.
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