IBM to ship world’s fastest chip

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IBM will ship the fastest computer chip in the world on 10 September when the new zEnterprise System Mainframe is sent out to customers.

The processor offers a world-record speed of 5.2 GHz and is a four-core chip containing 1.4 billion transistors on a 512 square mm surface.

It also features 24MB of Level 3 Cache memory, with IBM's embedded dynamic random access memory (DRAM) technology allowing dense DRAM caches to be placed on the same chips as high-speed microprocessors.

The record-breaking technology, which was created as part of a $1.5 billion (£976 million) investment involving IBM labs from across the world, is aimed at businesses managing monolithic workloads, such as banks and retailers.

The zEnterprise System itself is the most powerful commercial system ever launched by Big Blue and features 96 of the fastest microprocessors in the world.

The core server, where the microprocessors reside, can execute over 50 billion instructions per second. This equates to around 17,000 times more instructions than the high-end machine of IBM's popular System/360 family from 1970, known as Model 91.

New software has also been included in the IBM microprocessor technology to optimise performance when data-heavy workloads are being handled.

This means customers can expect a 60 per cent performance boost with intensive database operations, or 66 per cent for Java workloads.

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