(Via AppleInsider)

While most chipmakers are stressing the parallelism of many cores in a single chip, IBM on Monday revealed the POWER6, a new dual-core processor that the company boasts as the world’s fastest.

The New York state-based firm has used energy optimizations to double the clock speed to an unprecedented 4.7GHz without consuming added power. The chip could also run at the same speed with half the consumption, IBM says.

 Its speed is reportedly three times faster in heavy-duty benchmarks than Intel’s pure 64-bit Itanium, representing a comeback for the PowerPC architecture from which POWER draws its base. The PowerPC G5 system used in late iMacs and PowerMacs was based on a stripped-down version of the POWER4 introduced first in 2002.

Perhaps fittingly, IBM also compared the 300GB of raw bandwidth available through the POWER6’s system bus to an Apple product. The sheer speed was enough to “download the entire iTunes catalog” — 5 million songs — in a single minute, according to the company.