IBM Ships Fastest CPU on Earth

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.'"

It's a ploy

[imstanny]

Too bad Apple no longer uses IBM processors, this would've been a great marketing scheme for Steve Jobs.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[backwardMechanic]

I think it's a neat calculation. We've all lost track of what fast actually means for a modern CPU. I think task, in this context, would be understood by most to mean a (simple) instruction, maybe an increment for example. That we can compare light moving over such a small distance to the time it takes to complete an op is impressive. Maybe you've not stopped to actually think about it?

Meaningless Indicator of Processing Speed

[aadvancedGIR]

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?

[dreemernj]

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

[downix]

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.

Setting users on fire

[MECC]

IBM has created water-cooling systems akin to the radiators in cars to keep its processors from overheating. Not doing so, Meyerson quipped, "results in setting fire to the user, which is bad."

He's never had a help desk job....

Re:Useless measurement

[TeknoHog]

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.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[Ctrl-Z]

I don't know about you, but the length of my index finger is approximately the same as the width of my hand.