Sorry, this new 5.2 GHz processor wasn't designed for your
desktop. Tuesday during the Hot Chips 2010 conference, IBM
revealed more details surrounding its 5.2 GHz microprocessor,
the z196. The chip isn't designed for consumer consumption, but
rather for the company's Z-series of mainframes. Its cost is
estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands--perhaps even over
a million bucks. During the conference, IBM said that the
processor is based on CISC architecture and contains 1.4 billion
transistors on a 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. It also uses
a pair of co-processors for cryptographic operations.
Additionally, a 4-node system uses 19.5MB of SRAM for L1 private
cache, 144MB for L2 private cache, 576MB of eDRAM for L3 cache,
and 768MB of eDRAM for a level-4 cache. IBM engineer Brian
Curran said Tuesday that the z196 uses 1079 different
instructions. 75 of these instructions can be us