Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth

Posted by Zonk on Thu Apr 10, 2008 07:41 AM
from the glixchip-of-tau-alpha-ceti-still-beats-it-in-lab-tests dept.
IBM Hardware Technology
HockeyPuck writes "The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: IBM Ships fastest CPU on earth. by HockeyPuck (141947)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
  • What's a 'task'? If you think of a 'task' for a CPU to be an instruction, then any modern desktop or notebook CPU currently in production would meet Myerson's description:

    In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said
    C'mon. That's horrible. Where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?

  • Units of measurement (Score:5, Funny)

    by muellerr1 (868578) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:47AM (#23023098) Homepage
    I'm glad they stopped measuring chip speed in Hertz and are now using the simpler metric fingertip-to-knuckle units.

  • Tried running Vista SP1 on that monster... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jkrise (535370) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:48AM (#23023108) Journal
    and all the water turned into steam!

  • It's a ploy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by imstanny (722685) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:49AM (#23023118)
    Too bad Apple no longer uses IBM processors, this would've been a great marketing scheme for Steve Jobs.

    • Re:It's a ploy (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:55AM (#23023202)
      Don't be silly.

      Apple doesn't care about marketing, they are only interested in making quality product.

      • Re:It's a ploy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by UnknowingFool (672806) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:36AM (#23023632)

        The switch from PPC to Intel wasn't really about performance or pricing. It was about supply and logistics. Both the Motorola and IBM PPC chips were custom chips from their Power architecture as neither company sold CPUs for general consumer computers. IBM made chips mostly for workstations and servers (which were considerably more powerful and expensive).

        Like most manufacturers, Apple, IBM, and Motorola do not want to keep a large inventory of anything. So Apple would only order and project as much as they thought they needed. IBM and Motorola would allocate enough resources for Apple's forecasts. But the problem was Apple was selling Macs faster than they anticipated. So they would order more. Neither IBM or Motorola could keep up with the increased supply.

        Even if they ordered millions of chips a year, Apple was never going to be IBM's or Motorola's largest customer. They could not dedicate large amounts of resources for one custom product line of one customer when they had much larger customers (for IBM, their own workstation/server division. for Motorola, their electronics division). At most, Apple was their highest profile customer.

        From Apple's standpoint, they were tired of not getting enough CPUs. So if they switched to a stock Intel chip, their supply problems because more manageable. Because for Intel it wouldn't be a small customer ordering more of a specialized part; it would be a small customer order more of the stock part.

  • National Lampoon Radio Hour (Score:5, Funny)

    by sm62704 (957197) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:50AM (#23023150) Journal
    'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards.

    Made me think of a National Lampoon Radio Hour (SNL before it was on TV) skit about the George Foreman-Muhammed Ali fight. Foreman (John Belushi IIRC) talking about Ali:

    "He so fast he can turn off the light and be in bed before the room get dark!"

  • I use the new sun chips at work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheGratefulNet (143330) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:51AM (#23023164)
    ob disc: I work at sun (but not ON those chips).

    I write management software that lets admins turn on/off/standby (etc) the state of the various 'cpus' (threads, as sun calls them). there are 128 and 256 cpus in a regular 2u..4u style rackmount box. these are 'simple' air cooled systems with fans blowing over the whole U-style chassis and over the passive cpu heatsinks. nothing 'scary' at all, really.

    it is pretty wild to be able to do the equiv of 'show cpu' and have an ascii output scroll 64, 128 and even 256 times; one for each 'cool thread' which is a real actual processor element.

    the down side is that this threading stuff does not automatically get you faster speed on a SINGLE non-threaded traditional task. as I understand it, these T-series sun boxes are meant to process a lot of transactions (think webservers) and not so much number crunching.

    how do you define 'fastest chip'? well, one thing is for sure, you do NOT simply go by 'gigahertz' alone. that's really an oversimplification.

  • And in 25 year's time... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gordonjcp (186804) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:51AM (#23023166) Homepage
    ... it will be in a washing machine controller.

  • Meaningless Indicator of Processing Speed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aadvancedGIR (959466) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:20AM (#23023436)
    5 billion THEORICAL instructions per second just mean nothing.

    Anyway, the DSP I'm working on, the TI C6416 (1GHz), claims up to 8 billion instructions/s (5 to 6 can be realistically obtained).

  • Average Person? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dreemernj (859414) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:20AM (#23023440) Homepage Journal

    It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is
    It's hard to make the average person understand that the CPU isn't the entire box under their desk. Don't even bother with trying to explain this. The average person doesn't want to know.

  • Useless measurement (Score:4, Insightful)

    by downix (84795) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:52AM (#23023798) Homepage
    I always said rating CPU's in Hertz is like rating engines by cubic inches. Bigger *can* get more performance, but it's no guarantee. The compression, carbeuration, transmission, fuel flow, exhaust, all add up to final performance, same as cycles per instruction, the amount of work each instruction can do, the memory bandwidth and the IO system all add up to system performance in a computer.

    • Re:Useless measurement (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TeknoHog (164938) on Thursday April 10 2008, @09:16AM (#23024084) Homepage Journal
      I've compared CPU clock frequency to the RPM in engines. Both of them measure the number of basic operation cycles per unit time. However, what exactly happens in a cycle is left open. When other things are equal, more RPM/GHz means higher performance. In practice, it's rare to find such accurate comparisons, due to the multitude of those other factors.
  • ...but it's not my index finger....

  • This fast... (Score:4, Funny)

    by AttillaTheNun (618721) on Thursday April 10 2008, @09:15AM (#23024072)
    'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,'

    and I thought he was going to finish that with "and it goes THIS fast!!!", as he waves his finger across his face as fast as he can.

    That's how my brother and I used to measure seconds when we were 5 years old. Accurate to within 500% (your mileage may vary).

  • Speed of light in FPS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by helicologic (845077) on Thursday April 10 2008, @09:41AM (#23024452)
    It's very useful to remember that the speed of light is about a billion feet per second, or a foot in a billionth of a second. He was just looking for a measure that is 1/5 of a foot long.
    • IBM just hired some peeps from the Intel marketing division.

    • Re:Sour grapes or a real arguement (Score:5, Informative)

      by Albanach (527650) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:27AM (#23023516) Homepage
      It's horses for courses. If you're serving web pages and running database queries from a well tuned database, the Sun Niagara chips are fast and very well suited. They serve the pages a little slower, but can serve many more at a time.

      If, on the other hand what you're doing is not easily threaded then IBM probably have the upper hand. Say you're doing some mathematical analysis, where you have to do everything in sequence. IBM's faster processor can complete each stage quicker, moving on to the next part and delivering the result faster than a chip with more threads but slower speed.

    • Power6 architecture: it's different (Score:5, Informative)

      by frankie (91710) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:29AM (#23023540) Journal
      Power6 is a big change from Power4 & Power5 series. The key factor is: it gains clock and SMT at the expense of OoOE. In-order execution means its performance is deeply dependent on perfectly tuned compilers.

      Other than the lack of out-of-order, on paper it looks pretty strong. Dual core, lots of bandwidth, up to 7 IPC (5 in one thread, 2 in the other), big GHz, voltage & frequency slewing, and yes it has AltiVec.

      p.s. No, it would not be good for Macs. POWER chips are all made for big iron.

      • Re:Sour grapes or a real arguement (Score:5, Informative)

        by Hal_Porter (817932) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:50AM (#23023774)
        Actually the whole article is utter bollocks. They talk about 5 billion instructions per second. But

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6 [wikipedia.org]

        Each core has two integer units, two binary floating-point units, and a decimal floating-point unit, and is capable of two way SMT. The binary floating-point unit incorporates âoemany microarchitectures, logic, circuit, latch and integration techniques to achieve [a] 6-cycle, 13-FO4 pipeline,â according to a company paper.[6] Unlike the servers from IBM's competitors, the POWER6 has hardware support for decimal arithmetic and will include the first decimal floating-point unit integrated in silicon. More than 50 new floating point instructions handle the decimal math and conversions between binary and decimal.[7] This is a feature being added to the processors powering IBM's System z.[8]
        So it has a 5Ghz clock rate but can actually manage a bit more than 5 Bips peak. But

        A notable difference from POWER5 is that IBM moved from an out-of-order design to an in-order design, a drastic change which should require software recompilation for top performance. However, the processor still achieves significant performance improvements even with unmodified software, according to the lead engineer on the POWER6 project.[2]
        Hmmph. I'd bet it's got a really long pipeline to reach that clock speed.

        The POWER6 has approximately 790 million transistors and 341 mm large fabricated on an 65 nm process. It was released on the 8th June 2007, at speeds of 3.5 GHz, 4.2 GHz and 4.7 GHz[2], but the company has noted prototypes have reached 6 GHz.[3] POWER6 reached first silicon in the middle of 2005[4].
        Wow it's huge, almost twice the size of a Core 2 Duo.

        I think IBM is doing taking the NetBurst approach - a long pipeline to get to high frequencies. Plus it's a server chip only used in their servers so they can design for a much higher TDP than Intel or AMD and rely on water cooling.

        I think this guy is spot on
        http://aceshardware.freeforums.org/praising-the-power-6-design-t426.html [freeforums.org]

        Later this year Intel will release the 65 nm bulk CMOS Tukwila and
        it will likely easily outperform the 65 nm SOI CMOS Power6 on the
        benchmarks of most interest to buyers of business critical servers
        despite running at less than half its clock frequency and having
        less than half its socket level bandwidth. IBM might have created
        a better product and closer competitor to Tukwila better if Power6
        had been a quad design based on a Power5 core worked over to
        improve performance/power but then its wouldn't have the mega-
        giga for headlines in the WSJ and given IBM Micro a measure of
        bragging rights to help justify its continued existence. ;-)

    • Re:It's the uses, stupid! (Score:5, Informative)

      by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Thursday April 10 2008, @07:54AM (#23023190)
      Nice chip. Now what OS and applications run on it?

      I'd guess anything that runs on the Power archicture. Here's a list of the various OSs [wikipedia.org] that have been supported on various iterations of the Power architecture at one time or another.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by LWATCDR (28044)
      Well the big ones are.
      Linux
      AIX
      and i5/OS

      Applications?
      DB2, Oracle, SAP, and goodness knows how many super advanced and mega expensive packages for specific industries that the average person never knows about.

      In other words it isn't wasted on Office, Vista, and other low end applications.

    • There is no such thing as an all-purpose CPU (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sirwired (27582) on Thursday April 10 2008, @08:13AM (#23023366)
      There are indeed many algorithms that run well in a parallelized environment. IBM even makes the world's fastest supercomputers that take advantage of this fact.

      However, there are many other tasks fit for computers that do not parallelize well. In addition, writing massively parallelized software is often quite HARD. It is far easier to design software for a single CPU running very quickly, than a whole boatload of CPU's running slower. There have in fact been quite a few articles in CS journals lately wondering how on earth software is going to be written for all these new bunch-o-cores CPUs. While it can be done, it is tedious, expensive, and error-prone for all but the most trivial tasks.

      SirWired

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.