A Monday event in New York City will mark the expansion of IBM’s hefty share of the $14-billion UNIX server market – with the unveiling of the company’s long-anticipated Power7 microprocessor.

The new microprocessor, which has been manufactured in East Fishkill though most of its hardware and software development work took place in Poughkeepsie, is – as the name suggests - IBM’s seventh generation of chips in the line up which are a central part of several of the company’s computer systems.

An individual Power7 microprocessor is virtually equivalent to a 32-core processor – with eight processing cores integrated in one chip package, and each of the cores capable of executing four tasks called ‘threads.’

The newly-introduced Power7 systems include three categories: the IBM Power 780 with an advanced modular design and up to 64 Power7 cores for scalable, high-end servers; the midrange IBM Power 770 which also has to 64 Power7 cores; the IBM Power 755 boasting a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores.

Noting that Power7 microprocessor combines IBM’s flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate ‘Cell’ processor, Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group earlier said: “We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core.”