Power6 coming to a blade near you in February

Ashlee Vance writing for The Register (no, he doesn’t write anywhere else so far as I know, but I thought that opening sounded pretty professional) reported late last week that IBM is expected to plug its Power6 chips into a blade form factor by February of 2008

Thus far, IBM is only shipping the midrange p570 server with the new Power6 chips. Big Blue seems to be taking its sweet time adding the speedy processor to lower- and higher-end gear. But you’d expect the blade server to stand as just about the last to get Power6, meaning customers should see a full Power6-based server line by early 2008.

The Power6-based blade marks the first time IBM has taken its high-end RISC chip to the compact form factor. So far, IBM has relied on the PowerPC 970 for its RISC blades.

IBM has said that the Power6-based blade will run i5/OS in addition to AIX. It has also revealed that the blade will use a low voltage version of Power6 running in the low 4GHz range.