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IBM claims world's fastest processor with 5.2GHz z196 processor. Will it run Crysis?

September 7th, 2010        
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IBM claims world's fastest processor with 5.2GHz z196 processor. Will it run Crysis?

After a good lecture from the Prescott era, Chipzilla is getting its sweet stroll in the race for the fastest processor in the gigantic galaxy. Remember when the Pentium 4c 3.0GHz was what Intel said to be the fastest? Time sure flies. Now IBM, who has been under the radar after Apple migrated to Intel, recently announced that their 5.2GHz z196 processor is the fastest chip in the planet. I’m sure I’ve seen numbers far higher than that, from crazy enthusiasts like Kingpin, while fooling around with some liquid nitrogen.

However, IBM does it without those funky yet ‘seemed dangerous’ setup, as this is an enterprise chip which does it without those liquid nitrogen around. It’s a four-core slab that was manufactured using the outfit’s 45nm process technology. Numbers wise, 1.4 billion transistors, and the ability to handle more than 50 billion calculations per second. Sadly however, we have a number comparison from Fujitsu’s Venus CPU, and it can handle a staggering 128 billion instructions per second.

Sad news for you rich kids out there, this will not show up in the customization list of your next Alienware rig, so you won’t know if it runs Crysis max. Well I’m sure it will, but meh, just merely.

SOURCE via IBM

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  • satel

    What does IBM’s recent silence have to do with Apple moving to Intel? IBM never supplied chips to Apple. It was Motorola who made the PowerPC chips for Apple.

  • Don

    @satel

    Not necessary true. The Power architecture was designed by IBM, for Apple. Apple pulled in Motorola due to their relationship, and formed an alliance of 3, known as AIM (Apple-IBM-Motorola). Motorola largely involved in the manufacturing (and supplying, like you said), but the design of the architecture still comes from IBM, namely the 64bit G5 processor used in the last Mac Pro, before Apple moves to Intel’s camp.

    Motorola leaves the chip manufacturing business in 2004 i think, by spinning off its semiconductor business as an independent company known as “Freescale Semiconductor”. Soon after, IBM also leaves the embedded processor market by selling its line of PowerPC products to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) and focused their chip designs for PowerPC CPUs towards game machine makers such as Nintendo’s GameCube and Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

    Back then IBM’s Power Architecture was known to be ‘very powerful’ by Apple. But I guess there’s still the ceiling for the dated design. When Apple moves to Intel’s camp, they were “citing the performance limitations of the chip for future personal computer hardware specifically related to heat generation and energy usage in future products, as well as the inability of IBM to move the 970 (PowerPC G5) processor to the 3 GHz range”