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PALO ALTO--IBM revealed more details of its 5.2-GHz chip on Tuesday, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Don't bet that you'll ever be able to buy it, though.
At the Hot Chips 2010 conference here, IBM executives described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not over a million. IBM will ship the chip in September, said Brian Curran, an IBM distinguished engineer. The mainframe itself was announced in July.
IBM also previously claimed the title of fastest microprocessor with the POWER6 chip, which ran at speeds of up to 4.6 to 4.7 GHz, and its own z10, a 2008 chip which ran at speeds of up to 4.4 GHz. For its part, Curran claimed that the z196 only
IBM defines the z196 as one of the few remaining CISC chips, which allows for bulky, large programs that can require much more memory to execute in than RISC chips, including the PowerPC and ARM embeddded processors, among others.
The z196 contains 1.4 billion transistors on 512 sq. mm chip fabricated on 45-nm PD SOI technology. It contains a 64 Kbyte level-1 instruction cache, a 128-Kbyte L1 data cache, a 1.5-Mbyte private L2 cache per core, plus a pair of co-processors used for cryptographic operations. In a 4-node system, 19.5 Mbytes of SRAM are used for L1 private cache, 144 MB for L2 private cache, 576 MB of eDRAM for L3 cache, and a whopping 768 MB of eDRAM for a level-4 cache. All this is used to ensure that the processor finds and executes its instructions before searching for them in main memory, a task which can force the system to essentially wait for the data to be found - dramatically slowing a system that is designed to be as fast as possible.
The chip uses 1079 different instructions, Curran said. Of these, 75 can be used by millicode only, with 219 executable by millicode; an additional 24 instructions are conditionally executed by millicode. (Millicode is an internal term used at IBM for instructions internally executed by the processor, slightly bulkier than the "microcode" used by other chips.) The chip can use 211 medium instructions cracked into two or more instructions at issue, with 269 dual issued. The remaining 340 instructions are RISC-like, Curran said.

Wikipedia wrote:The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.

Wikipedia wrote:In February 2010, Researchers at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland announced a breakthrough in transistors with the design and fabrication of the world's first junctionless transistor. The research led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge was published in Nature Nanotechnology and describes a control gate around a silicon nanowire that can tighten around the wire to the point of closing down the passage of electrons without the use of junctions or doping. The researchers claim that the new junctionless transistors can be produced at 10-nanometer scale using existing fabrication techniques.