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IBM Unveils Fastest Microprocessor Ever
adeelarshad82 writes "IBM revealed details of its 5.2-GHz chip, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, IBM described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes. The z196 contains 1.4 billion transistors on a chip measuring 512 square millimeters fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology. It contains a 64KB L1 instruction cache, a 128KB L1 data cache, a 1.5MB private L2 cache per core, plus a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations. IBM is set to ship the chip in September."
But will it run ... a Beowolf cluster of ...
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I can't wait to get a PowerMac G6 with this CPU, in your face Dell users with your commodity Intel-based desi... oh, wait.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That ought to be enough instruction cache for anybody.
No news here. Everyone knows the only innovation going on in the big companies is in Apple nowadays. Move along...
> I'd say they were after a bigger prize than, say, hardcore gamers ;-)
Yeah. They're after the *really fucking hardcore* gamers.
I could never... Aero is... the best thing ever... it's so amazing and useful. It improves the look and feel so much.
Wait, do I have it turned on or off right now?
Had a golf game ended differently, would we be seeing these in power macs?
IBM also previously claimed the title of fastest microprocessor with the POWER6 chip, which ran at speeds of up to 4.6 to 4.7 GHz, and its own z10, a 2008 chip which ran at speeds of up to 4.4 GHz.
I seem to recall that one of the official reasons Apple gave for the switch from Power to Intel was that IBM couldn't/wouldn't deliver a fast enough processor.
Not saying I'd recommend it, but if that's the measure that you want to use then I'd say a cheap clunker could probably beat the both of them*.
*Take the rest of the cash your would have spent buying either one and spend that on blowjobs.