The Power5+ Processor, IBMs successor to its 'enterprise-class' Power5, will be seeing for the first time a market introduction into a low-cost segment of the market, being placed into lower priced UNIX servers and workstations. Primarily for researchers, the Power5+ is the first true dual-core offering from IBM and starts at 1.9GHz. IBM has in the past released combined-core packages with as many as four cores, and has promised that soon the Power5+ will also be featured in higher end servers as well.
IBM offers their hardware only with AIX Unix or variants of Linux, so no go for integrators wanting a Windows or other server OS, and that is true for IBM from bottom to top, including their new IntelliStation Power 285 workstation. IBM is not a huge player in the desktop market but they are still respected as one of the big boys in the high-end computing industry, especially among enterprise applications and institutions.