IBM unveils new zEnterprise System featuring 96 of the world’s fastest microprocessors
IBM has announced details of its most powerful commercial system ever. The core server of the new zEnterprise System mainframe – called zEnterprise 196 – contains 96 z196 processors, which IBM touts as the world’s fastest, most powerful computer chip.
IBM is aiming the system at businesses such as banks and retailers dealing with the skyrocketing amounts of data resulting from the ever increasing amount of business transactions carried out in an increasingly inter-connected business world.
z196 processor
To the mind-boggling numbers. The z196 processor is a four-core chip that contains 1.4 billion transistors on a 512-square millimeter surface.
It boasts a clock speed of 5.2GHz and was manufactured using IBM’s 45-nanometer SOI processor technology. It also makes use of IBM’s patented embedded DRAM (eDRAM) technology, which provides improved performance by allowing for the placement of dense DRAM caches, or components, on the same chips as high-speed microprocessors.
zEnterprise System
Packing 96 of these processors into the core server of the zEnterprise System results in the most powerful commercial IBM system ever.
It can execute more than 50 billion instructions per second, which is roughly 17,000 times more instructions than the company’s high-end Model 91 could execute in 1970.
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