

IBM's zEnterprise 196 CPU: Cache is king - 'The fastest CPU in the world.' - ableal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/23/ibm_z196_mainframe_processor/

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patrickgzill
Not 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...

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Retric
IMO 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.

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Andys
I 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.

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wmf
Spoiler: It's not really the fastest, just the highest-clocked (5.2 GHz).

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ramchip
The 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.

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wmf
You'd expect to see some benchmark numbers if so.

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wipt
Impressive. I'll continue to dream about Big Blue.

