Power 8 has an area of 650 square millimeters and will work running at 4GHz. It will be manufactured at IBM's 22-nanometer process technology based on silicon-on-insulator. The processor has 64 KB L1 and 512 KB L2 cache per core, and 96 MB shared L3 cache of internal memory and up to 128 MB L4 cache off chip. IBM in particular likes to point out that it will support up to 1 TB of DRAM memory and a memory bandwidth of 230 GB/s, and each core will be twice as efficient than the previous model, power 7.

For now there is no information when the new processors may arrive on the market.

[Ed - IBM has a solid history of making CPUs including a run providing them to Apple for a while. The introduction of the Power 8 should make things a little more interesting depending on how much market penetration IBM can get. We doubt this will be a threat to Intel, but AMD is vulnerable right now.]

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