Anyone have any idea why IBM hasn't released the POWER4+successors to the p690 yet? Sure IBM doesn't have to release a successor in any hurry because there isn't anyone with a signficantly better performing system for commercial workloads at this point. I was just wondering if they decided that they need to boost the on chip cache size. All of the current and upcoming competion has larger on chip caches on a per CPU basis, and appears to be deriving signifcant performance improvements from it. No doubt sharing the L2 hinders the performance on some applications by reducing the amount of cache available. They ought to be able to double the cache size in 0.13um while still reducing die size by 25%. The only issue would be the increased power consumption, but that ought to be managable if it only goes into the high end systems.

Anil