IBM plans to turn up the heat in the Unix server market with a summer release of its long-awaited Power 6 processor.

Expected in the next two months, Power 6 will feed into IBM’s pSeries servers that run the AIX operating system as well as iSeries mid-range models, zSeries mainframes and, possibly, blades.

Power 6 will be a dual-core chip that can run at speeds as high as 5GHz. It is fabricated on IBM’s new 65nm process and IBM has claimed that it has made design and manufacturing breakthroughs that will allow the chip to run cool, thus saving on space and power.

Research released by the National Computing Centre and Pillar Data Systems last week suggested that space constraints, power consumption and cooling are the biggest datacentre environmental issues faced by UK IT managers at companies with more than of 500 staff.