IBM gives us more details of its z196 5.2GHz microprocessor, which is the fastest ever. To be used on IBM’s Z-series mainframe, the z196 is a CISC chip containing 1.4 billion transistors on 512 sq. mm chip fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology, a 64 Kbyte level-1 instruction cache, a 128-Kbyte L1 data cache, a 1.5-Mbyte private L2 cache per core, and a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations.
The IBM z196 also gets 19.5MB SRAM L1 private cache, 144MB SRAM L2 private cache and 576 MB eDRAM L3 cache. It will be shipped in September and will cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not over a million.”
