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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."
Yes, but their article comments are much closer to Youtube than Slashdot.
More or less. They hit two walls - fabricating chips that could run faster while retaining an acceptable yield, and dealing with the heat such chips produced.
The fastest general-sale chips were the P4s - the end of their line marked the end of the gigahertz wars, as Intel switched from ramping up the clock to ramping up the per-cycle efficiency with the Core 2 and their complete architecture overhaul. As a result a 2GHz Core 2 duo will outperform a 4GHz P4 dual-core under most conditions. Better pipeline organisation, larger caches better managed.
Clock rate is no longer the key variable in comparing processors, unless they are of the same microarchitecture.
"clockspeed is NOT related to throughput"
Of course it is. It is not, however, the only factor, and other factors may indeed (and commonly do) outweigh it.
"IBM may have created a very highly clocked CPU and given it tons of transistors, but I seriously doubt if it will compete with a modern day server CPU from Intel or even AMD."
I think you underestimate IBM's technical ability. They do have some idea of what they're doing.
"pure performance maybe, but definitely not price-performance or performance-per-watt"
That's like saying a Ferrari is a poor performance car because it can't compete against a Ford Focus on cost-per-max-speed or miles-per-gallon.