Austin American-Statesman news-paper confirmed our earlier report that IBM had received the first working prototypes of Power5 processors earlier this year. IBM’s managers now say that the yet another 64-bit CPU from IBM is right on track and will be available next year.

The Power5 dual-core chip is capable of handling up to four threads simultaneously and IBM expects from the Power5 up to four-fold performance boost due to new and more efficient architecture over the previous generation of server CPUs. IBM is currently fully satisfied with the test results of preliminary sample of the Power5 chip made using 0.13 micron technology in its laboratories. The Power5 chip will initially run at 1.50GHz, but will have more capabilities for conserving electrical power compared to the predecessor, and it will be more highly integrated than the Power4 to eventually become a building-block component for very high-performance supercomputers.

The Power5 chip, after exhaustive testing and tweaking, will show up in servers that IBM will introduce during the first half of 2004. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has signed up to buy a supercomputer that will use 12 544 Power5 chips, according to the report over here.

The news-paper also added that IBM had begun its work on the Power6 microprocessor that will emerge in the second half of the decade.

With IBM being more and more committed to its Power architecture, unlike HP, Intel definitely has quite a lot of reasons to worry about. We all know that IBM and Sun, both are one of the most-respected server makers, are not going to give up at all and prepare a number of new and exciting products.