IBM Plans to Ship World’s Fastest Processor in September

IBM recently announced zEnterprise mainframe computer , powered by z196 processors which will provide record breaking speed. The high speed is necessary to manage huge workload such as banks and retailers because world becomes increasingly more inter-connected, data has grown beyond the world’s storage capacity, and business transactions continued to reach beyond the limit.

The company spent $1.5 billion on research and development to develop the new chip technology, which is going to be available in the market as 5.2-GHz z196 CPU. The core server in the zEnterprise System — called zEnterprise 196 — contains 96 of the world’s fastest, most powerful microprocessors which can execute more than 50 billion instructions per second. 5,000 employees worked on the project.

This new IBM microprocessor technology has new software to maximize performance of heavy data driven workloads. The latest technology is going to bring  60% improvement in data intensive and Java workloads compared to its predecessor System z10. As a result of this, software performance improves with the increase level of system performance which can reduce software license costs.  The new chip is designed for traditional mainframe actions as well as computation-focused tasks, such as analyzing financial transactions for patterns that might point to fraud etc.