Tuesday, May 22nd 2007
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IBM Unleashes The World's Fastest Processor
IBM today simultaneously launched what it claims is the fastest processor in the world and an ultra-powerful new computer server that leverages the chip's many breakthroughs in energy conservation and virtualization technology. IBM's new POWER6 chip is a 64 bit, dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7GHz and 8MB of on chip L2 cache. At 4.7GHz, the dual-core POWER6 processor doubles the speed of the previous generation POWER5 while using nearly the same amount of electricity to run and cool it. This means customers can use the new processor to either increase their performance by 100 percent or cut their power consumption virtually in half. Also announced today is the IBM's new 2- to 16-core server which offers three times the performance per core of the HP Superdome machine. The new server is also the first ever to hold all four major benchmark speed records for business and technical performance.
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IBM
30 Comments on IBM Unleashes The World's Fastest Processor
These chips must have alot of power saving techniques, doubling clock speed and still using that same amount of energy is not an easy task. just look at p4 compared to p3. while the clock speed is nice and all, i would like to see benchmarks, perhaps on a linux based work station between opteron, xeon, and power pc, all using the same amount of cores and the highest spec'd chips (no overclocking) then a test with all of them overclocked. My guess would be xeon would die in something memory intensive with power pc in second, and amd in first. In all eles..i would think xeon would win or be close. sorry for the long post guys.
They are made to run looping instructions or instructions that are pipe fed. Not graphics or sound or any other high variable process. And when they are in high variable process (think huge database) they use alot of system RAM and fast SAS disks to make up for the CPU's latency.
Yes they are super fast when fed a long stream of instructions that don't branch, or call for a whole active set to be flushed then reloaded a few cycles later. We on the other hand use our CPU's for graphics setup, sound, and many other out of order processes.
.. Sorry about the needless rant. I read some of the posts and felt like saying something. :laugh: