IBM z196 5.2GHz processor is the world’s fastest
IBM has announced the world’s fastest processor — the z196. The superfast chip is designed for supercomputers and clocks at 5.2GHz. But sadly you won’t be able to buy it as it is expected to cost in hundreds of thousands or perhaps a full million dollars!
The IBM z196 is based on CISC architecture and boast of 1.4 billion transistors on 512 sq. mm chip fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology.
The chip provides 64KB L1 instruction cache, 128KB L1 data cache, and 1.5MB private L2 cache per core.
In addition, it features a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations.
A 4-node system is equipped with 19.5MB of SRAM for L1 private cache, 144 MB for L2 private cache, 576MB of eDRAM for L3 cache, and massive 768MB of eDRAM for a level-4 cache.
The chip uses 1079 different instructions, out of which 75 can be used by millicode only, 219 executable by millicode, and additional 24 instructions are conditionally executed by millicode.
Expect IBM to officially launch z196 processor in September.
[via Yahoo News]
