Photos: IBM's new Power6

The Power6 chip has 790 million transistors — IBM says. We haven't counted — on one piece of silicon. It is a 64-bit dual-core processor running at up to 4.7GHz with 8MB of on-chip Level 2 cache and a memory bus that can reconfigure itself to save power at low loads.

This cross section of a Power6 chip shows two of those 790 million transistors in great detail. The transistors are shown in gold. It was photographed using a scanning electron microscope, which the company is delighted to let us know it also invented.

IBM test manufacturing technician BJ Barrett is shown here testing a Power6 chip at another IBM facility in Burlington, Vermont. BJ Barrett has not gone on the record to talk about what sort of yield IBM can expect for its full-speed chips.