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.'"

Worst analogy EVAR!

[morgan_greywolf]

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?

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[ukatoton]

Is it not obvious? Myerson is BadAnalogyGuy!

Re:

[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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I can let one riiiiiiiiiiiiiip faster than this.

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?

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

He should have said "it's so fast it'll do an infinite loop in half a second".

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[joaommp]

only Chuck Norris can reach the end of infinite loops. And he can do it twice.

And then he roundhouse kicks you into oblivion.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[ScriptedReplay]

I think it's a neat calculation. We've all lost track of what fast actually means for a modern CPU.

Yeah, it's a fast CPU. And it gets faster if you have smaller hands. Or if you watch your hands move by at close to the speed of light. Way cool.

Should sell like crazy in Japan.

Re:

[FredFredrickson]

And it gets faster if [...] you watch your hands move by at close to the speed of light. Way cool.

Ah, but the speed of light is absolute no matter what the reference point is, so technically, it'd be the same speed, whether you or the hand was moving.

Re:

[backwardMechanic]

So, if I throw my computer out of the window, I'll get more FLOPS?

Re:

[Dr Caleb]

"So, if I throw my computer out of the window, I'll get more FLOPS?"

That's the jist of the meaning behind 'Vista Capable'. If you want it to go faster, throw it harder.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[cababunga]

So, if I throw my computer out of the window, I'll get more FLOPS?

No, you won't. But you may get better performance if you throw all the windows out of your computer.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[backwardMechanic]

Fair point. So I should jump out of the window and my computer will run faster? I'm just looking fora few more cycles...

Re:

[grumbel]

I think it's a neat calculation. We've all lost track of what fast actually means for a modern CPU.

I don't think so. There is still the good old 'benchmark' which we call games or when you don't have games for the CPU, just measure the speed in consoles. "This thing is as fast as a dozen PS3" would give a reasonably good idea of its speed. That whole "finger in front of your face" is just plain bullshit and doesn't give you any idea whatsoever in relation to other devices.

What about BogoMIPS? Huh? Huh?

[Pharmboy]

But how many BogoMIPS is that? After all, that is most computers do, most of the time.

Think about it: This new chip can do nothing up to 2 to 3 times faster than any other chip on the market! We are talking about incredible productivity gains during idle times!

(why yes, I do work in marketing...)

Better analogy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Better analogy; He should've said;

'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'Ha Haw! Now you look like a retard!

Re:

[Rurik]

It could've worked, if it was just used as a frame of reference against the other speeds. So, the Power6 is from the knuckle to fingertip. What is the distance of the Pentium Extreme? From elbow to fingertip? Wrist to fingertip? The analogy is horrible, but it sounds amazing... until you frame the other items by the same reference and you realize that there probably isn't much difference between a knuckle and a wrist.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[GungaDan]

"there probably isn't much difference between a knuckle and a wrist"

Goatse Guy? Is that you?

Re:

[daveime]

I think the processor speed in a ZX81 was defined in arse-to-elbows per hour ;-)

Re:

[pipatron]

What's a 'task'?

Perhaps he meant that it could task switch in that time, which would mean handle the interrupt, saving the current register set, look up a new task from a list, load the registers, and jump. Sounds unlikely if they only have, say, 10 cycles to do it (5GHz for 2 nanoseconds), but who knows.

Re:

[pipatron]

Ah. I missed an important piece of information. "from your knuckle to your fingertip". I thought he was talking about from your eye to your fingertip...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the 'rule of thumb' (well, forefinger at least) - that light travels one foot in one nanosecond, and assuming he means the Metacarpophalangeal joint and not either of the Interphalangeal joints when he says "knuckle" - and for ease of calculation, assume that my forefinger is very roughly 2.4 inches from Metacarpophalangeal to tip. Then he's saying that the chip completes one "task" and starts another within 2.4/12 nanoseconds - 1/5th of a nanosecond. Five tasks per nanosecond is five billion tasks

Guy shoulda explained it like in the Italian Job

[srussia]

Lyle: I'm gonna get a NAD T-770 digital decoder with a seventy-watt amp and and Burr Brown D.A.C.'s.

Hansome Rob: [at a loss] Yeah...

Lyle: It's a big stereo. Speakers so loud, they blow women's clothes off.

Handsome Rob: Now you're talking!

Re:

[damn_registrars]

C'mon. That's horrible. Where's BadAnalogyGuy when you need him?

I think BadAnalogyGuy is lost in the libraries of congresses worth of data that will be served by this system.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dalai Lama is fascinated by the analogy:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/10/world/10lama-600.jpg [nytimes.com]

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

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

I do believe that's a (rather poorly executed) reference to Admiral Grace Hopper [wikipedia.org] and her "nanoseconds". :-)

Re:

[gEvil (beta)]

oh who am I kidding, even an overload joke can't make that analogy less bad!

Can you give us an example of an overload joke? I don't think I'm familiar with any of those.

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[Anonymous Coward]

So a priest, a rabbi, and a fork bomb walk into a bar...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So a priest, a rabbi, and a fork bomb walk into a bar...

...and the bartender says "what is this? some kind of joke?".

Re:Worst analogy EVAR!

[Have Blue]

And then the fork bomb walks into the bar, and then the fork bomb walks into the bar, and then the fork bomb walks into the bar...

Units of measurement

[muellerr1]

I'm glad they stopped measuring chip speed in Hertz and are now using the simpler metric fingertip-to-knuckle units.

Re:Units of measurement

[n3tcat]

Well, it makes it much easier to explain why multicore processors work faster. Though I expect problems when explaining more than 5 cores per chip...

Re:

[Enry]

By then the speeds will be fast enough that you can use toes as a measuring stick.

Re:

[darkpixel2k]

By then the speeds will be fast enough that you can use toes as a measuring stick.

...and even later, my penis size.

Re:

[spazdor]

And then once again India will end up doing it cheaper and faster than us. [ernestrossi.com]

Re:Units of measurement

[plover]

I thought this meant they were switching from bogomips to bogogips.

But then I suppose some math genius is going to come along and claim we should be counting bogipigips because bogogips is just a marketing term.

Re:Units of measurement

[TeknoHog]

But then I suppose some math genius is going to come along and claim we should be counting bogipigips because bogogips is just a marketing term.

Yeah, when bogopigs fly.

Re:Units of measurement

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I calculate a "fingertip-to-knuckle unit" to be 3.174 * 10^-4 football fields.

Re:Units of measurement

[Gazzonyx]

American or British football fields, man?! Be precise or we'll have another mibibyte(MiB) situation on our hands, for craps sake!

Re:Units of measurement

[TeknoHog]

American or British football fields, man?!

Huh.. I don't know that! Aaarrggh! *falls into the chasm*

Re:

[TheGratefulNet]

you can measure in groups of 5 finger-knuckle units at a time. after that, you have to, well, bank-swap. sort of.

its not all its cracked up to be.

Re:

[hallucinogen]

How many fingertip-to-knuckle units does the library of congress hold?

Re:Units of measurement

[BJH]

No, no no. You've got your units all mixed up.

The correct question to ask there would be:

"How many Libraries of Congress can I process in a fortnight with one hand?"

Re:Units of measurement

[Curien]

"How many Libraries of Congress can I process in a fortnight with one hand?"

The LoC has pr0n?

Re:

[jellomizer]

With Moores law it can get out of date really quickly. From your fingernail to you nose. From your finger tip to your nose. From your Nose Hair to your nose. I would say fractions of football fields would be a better unit.

Tried running Vista SP1 on that monster...

[jkrise]

and all the water turned into steam!

Sour grapes or a real arguement

[Silver Sloth]

From TFA

Sun spokesman Mark Richardson took umbrage at the focus on speed. "It's an easier marketing message to deliver to say that faster gigahertz means a faster processor," he said. His colleague, chip expert Fadi Azhari, explained how the Mountain View firm uses a different technical trick, called multithreading, to make a computer faster but not hotter.

Is this just sour grapes or has Mark Richardson got a valid point? I don't know enough to judge but I'm sure there's plenty of opinion her on /.

Re:

[Timesprout]

IBM just hired some peeps from the Intel marketing division.

Re:Sour grapes or a real arguement

[Albanach]

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.

Re:

[diegocgteleline.es]

It's a shame for Sun that POWER has also supported SMT for a long time.

Power6 architecture: it's different

[frankie]

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:

[kalirion]

So how would this CPU compare to a Core2Duo E8400 overclocked to 5GHz [xtremesystems.org]?

Re:Power6 architecture: it's different

[aproposofwhat]

Yes, although Gentoo will still take a week to compile ;P

Re:Sour grapes or a real arguement

[Hal_Porter]

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:

[raddan]

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. ;-)

I dunno-- this chip is more than just faster. IBM's chip can do decimal arithmetic on silicon. Have you ever had to work with real decimal numbers on a computer? It's a PITA. IA-32 has some basic support for BCD, but it leaves a lot up to you-- the processor really wants you to work with 32-bit binary numbers. IBM is nice enough to provide a library [ibm.com] you can use if you're too poor to afford a chip that can do real decimal math, though.

Financial institutions are required by law to perform financial c

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:It's a ploy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly.

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

Re:

[binaryspiral]

I love how the subtle sarcasm wasn't modded down by Apple fanboys.

Well played, /.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Exactly.

Imagine, you could compute at an insanely great speed while frying eggs on your Powerbook!

Re:

[beelsebob]

Not really, Apple never used the POWER line of processors. The G5 was derived from a POWER4, but it was quite far removed. Secondly, it was in fact the G5's roots in a heavy handed server chip that meant it never got small and cool enough to run in a laptop.

Re:It's a ploy

[UnknowingFool]

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

[sm62704]

'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!"

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's no SNL quote, that's actually Muhammed Ali.

A quick google search turns up a couple references, such as this one: http://www.nzlistener.co.nz/issue/3483/columnists/8092/great_greater_greatest.html;jsessionid=F86BAF04332CA229F91CA1A92B340560 [nzlistener.co.nz]

I use the new sun chips at work

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

Whether a faster clock speed or more cores will work in for any given application, is, of course, application dependent.

If the work you wish to do can be parallelized -- that is, broken into smaller pieces and then either reassembled when all the pieces are complete or, even, better, no assembly required -- and, more importanlty, your application is written to take advantage of parallelization then you will most certainly benefit from a CPU that can handle simultaneous threads.

OTOH, if your tasks can't be p

Re:I use the new sun chips at work

[s_p_oneil]

Fortunately, Java is a very thread-friendly language. I'm sure I could think of a way to use those 256 processors. ;-)

Re:

[ratboy666]

Um... they are NOT all processing elements

The T2000 (for example) has one die clocked at 1.2 or 1.4 Ghz. On that die are 8 processor cores. Each of these has 4 CMT threads (sort of what Intel used to call hyper-threading). 32 "virtual" cpus, 2U form factor. $6,995 base

The M-series, lets take the M5000 is built by Fujitsu. That has 8 processing elements, each clocked at 2.1 Ghz, with each dual-core. 16 "virtual" cpus. $47,000 base. 10U form factor.

The 5220 has 8 cores, 8 CMT per core, for 64 virtual cpus, 1.

And in 25 year's time...

[Gordonjcp]

... it will be in a washing machine controller.

Re:

[Timesprout]

Running Vista with SP 236, the one with extra spin.

Re:

[martin_henry]

...and Aero will allow your suds to look transparent!

Re:

[Yetihehe]

I, for one, welcome our 5ghz dishwashing overlords with some dirty dishes.

Re:

[Gordonjcp]

I replaced the control PCB in a washing machine about a year ago that used a 68020 CPU. No, that's not a typo. No, I don't need glasses. Yes, really a 68020, like in Mac II.

Does it have Altivec

[psergiu]

Does it have a Altivec unit ?
If it doesn't - it's just a useless overclocked G3 - Mac OS X Leopard will not run on it.
If it does have Altivec - anyone knows if it uses the same socket as the G5 ?

Re:

[simong]

Power6 is designed for servers so it's not likely. Had they been a year earlier to market we might have still not been running Windows on our G6 Powerbooks.

obscured objectives

[Hojima]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most of the algorithms for scientific simulations run just as well on parallel processors? If this is the case, it makes more sense to have cheaper processors (both to manufacture and run) so that the cap on the IPS is raised just as well (the cap being the ratio of the amount of funds an organization can allocate to these emulators versus the cost of the emulators). Though I'm no computer expert, it seems that making one sequential processor run faster isn't as efficient

There is no such thing as an all-purpose CPU

[sirwired]

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

Multicore speed explained.

[HellProphet]

For multi-core do you have to hold as many fingers up as there are cores to understand the speed over multiple cores?

5GHz != 5 billion instructions/sec

[Osvaldo Doederlein]

That would only be true if the CPU is able to retire a sustained average of one instruction per clock cycle. SFGate's article makes a raw comparison between chips with different number of cores, threads and other factors, considering only GHz...

Re:

[imgod2u]

Most if not all modern microprocessors are quite capable of sustaining more than one instruction/cycle assuming you're not doing something that is completely memory-bound. Hell, even silverthrone is 3-way superscalar (albeit in-order).

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).

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working on a much faster multi-core cheap based on a new concept of extreme simplify all code using SISC instructions (aka Single Instruction Set Computer) and I'm reaching several tens of billion NOP's per core.

When I power off the system it can sustain the proposed performance for a period of eternity seconds - best instructions per watt ratio ever found.

PS: Still trying to design an operating system for this architecture that can produce end results different than Windows on x86.

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.

And you can have one for just the small price of

[Rooked_One]

your soul.

Muahahahah

-D

Obligatory fortnight

[davidwr]

How many Libraries of Congress can it index per fortnight?

Hot like fire!

[Ngarrang]

From the article, "Then why don't Intel and Sun just crank up the speed? Well, just as is the case with cars, the faster chips run, the hotter they get, and 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.""

This part of the article made me laugh. Sick sense of humor? But, I would formally like to thank IBM for caring about setting me on fire or not.

Apple should use these.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Apple's development tools continue to generate binaries that support both Intel and PowerPC, and they continue to support the operating system on both architectures, so why not? Yes, I know, there's a difference between POWER and PowerPC, but it's not a big difference -- after all, you run the same version of Linux on an IBM pSeries that you do on a Power Mac.

Apple would have buying leverage against both IBM and Intel by being able to shift portions of their manufacturing from one architecture to another with each model. And they'd have access to some of the fastest processors on earth. Can you imagine one of these things powering Photoshop, or even rendering the next Pixar movie?

So what?

[Jodka]

The "speed" of a single CPU is a commercially useless measure of performance. We care about performance per dollar, not performance per CPU. And that dollar includes the cost of of energy required to operate the CPU associated cooling.

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.

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.

I'm holding a finger in front of my face...

[slyborg]

...but it's not my index finger....

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....

This fast...

[AttillaTheNun]

'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

[helicologic]

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.

Re:It's the uses, stupid!

[gEvil (beta)]

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.

YES!

[AndGodSed]

It DOES run Linux!

(mod me down if you must - but I just HAD to...) ...>ahem and other OS's too... like Windows NT...

Re:

[cbart387]

I'm sure glad that joke isn't wearing thin!

Re:

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:

[psergiu]

You can get a decent framerate only if you raise the FSB a little.

Re:

[djones101]

Darn you for beating me to it!

Re:

[kisielk]

It's only overclocking if you're running the chip at a clock speed faster than it is rated/designed for. If the chip is designed to be water-cooled, I wouldn't be callinng that overclocking.