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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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The Z-series mainframes cost hundreds of thousands (or even over a million) dollars, not the chips. As it says in the article.
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.
The thing is that if you have 2 (say) 1.6 GHz processors, they aren't as 'powerful' as one 3.2 GHz processor.
For one - there are overheads, certain stuff common between them, pipelines - stuff which I forgot (computer engineering related problems).
But the main thing is that not all programs are multi-threaded, and a program with a single thread can only run on one processor. So yeah, GHz are still useful. Maybe for large single-thread batch processing - which is the kind of thing a mainframe would do.
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.
When configured to run Linux, each core costs approx $125K. When configured for z/OS, each core costs approx $250K. A complete system (not including any storage or software) can cost up to around $30M.
The comments were about the fact that at 3GHz light travels 10cm per clock speed, which limits how far you can have 2 items on a bus if you want them to communicate within 1 clock cycle. There is no "light speed barrier" or anything of the sort, however at these frequencies you design knowing that it will take measurable time for an electric signal to propagate. For example, for this particular system whose core is at 5.2GHz, if you try to send a signal to an external memory that is say 11-12cm away, then it will take about two clock cycles just for the signal to travel the distance.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
"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.
Banks, Credit card companies, hospitals, Insurance companies...
Cheap clusters are great but they are not always the best tool for the job.
Very large traditional datasets involving lots of high value transactions, with 5 9s uptime requirements do not tend to scale well to COTS clusters.
IBM mainframes have uptimes measured in years if not decades.
They have hot swapable everything including CPUs. so you can do ugrades with zero downtime.
Also you need to take a look at the costs involved. The costs to throw out a working software system that has been used for decades and then the cost to redesign it to work on a Cluster of X86 boes will be huge.
Not to mention the investment in making it fault tolerant and if it is used in certain markets the cost of the auditing the software.
Not to mention that ZSystems tend to be really secure. There are just not a lot of exploits on Zsystems.
When downtime can cost millions of dollars hardware costs are just no that big of a deal.
Now if you are starting from scratch then you may save money by going with a cluster but then you may not depending on just how good your programmers are.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"They say it's an old CISC architecture. This is probably the sort of system that runs horribly outdated and un-updatable code, like the tax system."
You mean like Windows?
The X86 is also an old CISC architecture.
Actually the Power line is RISC anyway. When it is used in a ZMachine the old style 360/370/390 CISC ISA is translated to RISC and then executed.
Before you go ew that is what modern X86 chips do as well as ARM when using the Thumb Instruction set. The ZSystem ISA is so high end it is almost a high level language so the translation doesn't really effect performance much at all. Also that old CISC architecture is much better than the mess that we have on the X86.
I am not sure about how IBM does the translation. On the System 38 AS/400 System-I the translation was done during the IPL aka Initial Program Load. On the Zs it may be done as a JIT but I am not sure.
Honestly I love the idea and wish that Linux would adopt it. You could then have one binary that would work on any Linux system on an CPU.
The AS400 way kept a native binary copy along with the TIMI copy. When the program was run the first time it would translate the TIMI copy into the native segment. Yes the first time you ran the program it might take a bit to start but after that it would run at full speed and start fast. Of course you could add a binary segment when you first released the code for the ISA of your choice.
All in all those old Mainframes and Minis had a lot of brilliant tech we still don't have today on our PCs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.