Pay attention or else you may miss out this bit of news. After all it is about IBM’s new processor – which is supposedly the fastest there is right now. The company has claimed that the new zEnterprise can clock 5.2GHz without a hiccup and so, officially it is the world’s fastest microprocessor.
Of course, chips have been over-clocked (and perhaps attain or exceed this speed) by using liquid nitrogen as a coolant, but IBM’s hardware can perform at this speed normally, without external cooling.
So, will you see this super fast chip making its way into PC’s anytime soon? Perhaps not right now, because mainframe customers are the current target profile. Mainframes with this processor inside, will start shipping on September 10 and according to IBM these machine will make work processes faster and more productive.
The zEnterprise is a product of over 1.5 billion dollars being spent on research. It is a four-core chip having 1.4 billion transistors on a 512mm surface. IBM’s state-of-the-art 45 nanometer tech has been used to build this chip. This has allowed the placement of dense DRAM caches on a small chip, and in doing so, improve the performance drastically.
An official statement says that a core server in the zEnterprise System contains 96% of the world’s most powerful microprocessors and is capable of executing more than 50 billion instructions per second! That’s just how dramatically processor technology has improved over the years.
Once businesses start using this microprocessor, we will get to know how good it is in practice. If it does work, we could see a drastic change in banking and retail sector operations, which now depend to a large extent on the speed of servers. Then of course, there are immense possibilities to look forward once such as high speed processor is available for home computing!
