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IBM's zEnterprise 196 CPU: Cache is king - 'The fastest CPU in the world.'
- wmf 16y agoSpoiler: It's not really the fastest, just the highest-clocked (5.2 GHz).
- StavrosK 16y agoThey couldn't remember the fastest CPU in the world, this is just a tribute.
- jefft 16y agoand the peculiar thing was, the CPU that was released, it didn't perform anything like this CPU
- ramchip 16y agoThe article mentions that it is the highest-clocked, but I didn't see anything saying that it's not the fastest, too. It has not only the raw clock speed but several cores and a truckload of cache.
- wmf 16y agoYou'd expect to see some benchmark numbers if so.
- patrickgzill 16y agoNot really all that impressive, actually underwhelming and anti-climactic. The interconnects are where you see that Intel and AMD are catching up with them ... 60GB/sec interconnects? HyperTransport 3 can do 25.6GB/sec per CPU, and you can put up to 8 of them in a 3U or 4U box, and still use less power than just one of the IBM CPUs. 5.2Ghz, when they had all sorts of fancy water-cooling and other tricks available in what is essentially a cost-no-object CPU package? Yawn...
- Retric 16y agoIMO what's interesting is the 94MB of L4 cache shared among 80 usable cores at 5.2Ghz. Latency is really just a question of the speed of light and there are workloads where this could be 20+ times as fast as that 8 CPU cluster in a 3U box. The value is "GPU with cache" not a fast x86.
- Andys 16y agoI read that spec differently: 96MB of L4 per board (6 sockets/24 cores per board), and up to 16 boards in one machine. So the amount of cache, is vast, but not exactly shared equally between all sockets.
- rbanffy 16y agoCall me back when an AMD box reaches 5 9's... Seriously: x86 servers are good for some things. But these boxes can cut through a lot of workloads at speed and reliability levels a PC cannot dream of. The first mainframe I used, in the mid-80's, had more than 200 3278s connected to it. I see a lot of current servers that can't handle 200 concurrent requests.
- patrickgzill 16y agoOne of my oldest client's quad-Xeon (900Mhz CPUs), 6GB RAM system running Oracle has been up for 932 days at this point. That is 5 9's (actually better, it is 100%) over 2.5 years. I am sure that similarly configured Opteron based systems are out there with similar uptimes. Sure, mainframes are reliable, that wasn't my point however - AMD and Intel are catching up in terms of interconnects and other technology, at 1/1000th the price point.
- rbanffy 16y agoThe processors and interconnects may be faster, but that's not the whole story. The X-15 was fast, but you wouldn't use it to deliver FedEx packages. Or shipping containers. x86s are fast and, if your problems allow that, you can gang a bunch of them to crunch your workload faster and cheaper than any mainframe could, but that does not make these machines even a little bit less impressive than they appear.
- wipt 16y agoImpressive. I'll continue to dream about Big Blue.