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General description
Chapter 1.
The IBM Sserver p5 550 deskside and rack-mount servers are designed for greater
application flexibility, with innovative technology, to capitalize on the e-business revolution at
the entry-level or server environments. Introduced with the POWER4 and POWER4+
technology in 2001, available from the 1-way entry-level through the 32-way high-end pSeries
systems, the IBM POWER architecture achieved a new stage of capability characteristics by
including features such as logical partitioning (LPAR). With POWER5 microprocessor
technology, the p5-550 is the first cost-effective, high-performance entry UNIX server to
include the next development of the IBM partitioning concept, Micro-Partitioning.
Dynamic LPAR on a 4-way p5-550 allows up to four dedicated partitions. In addition, the
optional Advanced POWER Virtualization feature enables the support up to 40
Micro-Partitions on a 4-way system. Micro-Partitioning technology is an advanced feature of
the POWER5 processor that enables multiple partitions to share a physical processor. The
extended POWER Hypervisor controls dispatching the physical processors to each of the
Micro-partitions. In addition to Micro-Partitioning, the Advanced POWER Virtualization feature
allows sharing of physical network adapters and enables the virtualization of SCSI storage.
In combination with the extraordinary POWER5 processor, Micro-Partitioning is designed to
increase the system management efficiency and lowers the operating expenses by allowing
multiple use of single physical resources installed on the p5-550 system.
Simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) is a standard feature of POWER5 technology that allows
two threads to be executed at the same time on a single processor. SMT is selectable with
dedicated or Micro-partition processors.
The symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) p5-550 system features base 2-way or 4-way, 64-bit,
copper and silicone on insulator (SOI)-based POWER5 microprocessors running at 1.65 GHz
with 36 MB off-chip Level 3 cache configurations. Additional processor configurations are
allowed with the addition of IBM Sserver Capacity on Demand (CoD) features. Main
memory starting at 1 GB can be expanded up to 64 GB, based on the available DIMMs, for
higher performance and exploitation of 64-bit addressing to meet the demands of enterprise
computing, such as large database applications.
Included with the p5-550 are five hot-plug PCI-X slots with Enhanced Error Handling (EEH),
one embedded Ultra320 SCSI dual-channel controller, one 10/100/1000 Mbps integrated
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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2004. All rights reserved.
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