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."

Comments

Re:Speed times Quantity?

[gorzek]

Yeah, it's actually kind of funny how today's Intel desktop processors actually trace their lineage to the Pentium M, which was a mobile chip. When the Pentium 4 came around, the Pentium Pro (Pentium II, Pentium III) architecture was pretty much relegated to the mobile market while Pentium 4 represented their desktop line. As you said, they ran into heat (and power) issues with the Pentium 4s and basically had no more room for expansion there. They went back to the Pentium M, which was doing pretty nicely in the notebook space, and since it was low-power and efficient it became the basis for their future desktop CPUs--the Core line, in particular. They just stopped playing up the clock speed because that architecture's clock speeds were substantially lower than the Pentium 4, despite being able to do more work. I read once that a Pentium M could do about 40% more work than a Pentium 4 of the same clock, so in essence a 2GHz Pentium M was about as powerful as a 3.2 GHz P4.

Switching everything over to the low-power and parallel-friendly Pentium M line is probably one of the smartest things Intel ever did. They would've dug their own grave had they stuck with building on Pentium 4 to the bitter end.