World’s Fastest Microprocessors

IBM today introduced a new supercomputer powered by one of the world’s fastest microprocessors and cooled by an innovative water system . The new Power 575 supercomputer, equipped with IBM’s latest POWER6 microprocessor, uses water-chilled copper plates located above each microprocessor to remove heat from the electronics. Requiring 80 percent fewer air conditioning units, the water-cooled Power 575 can reduce typical energy consumption used to cool the data center by 40 percent. IBM scientists estimate that water can be up to 4,000-times more effective in cooling computer systems than air.

With 448 processor cores per rack, the new Power 575 offers more than five times the performance of its predecessor. A single rack features 14 2U nodes, each with 32, 4.7-Ghz cores of POWER6, and 3.5 TB of memory. At 600 GFlops per node, the Power 575 is three times more energy-efficient in GFlops per kilowatt than the POWER5 generation of air-cooled processors .

2003: Intel® Pentium® M Processor

The Intel® Pentium® M processor, the Intel® 855 chipset family, and the Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 network connection are the three components of Intel® Centrino™ mobile technology. Intel Centrino mobile technology is designed specifically for portable computing, with built-in wireless LAN capability and breakthrough mobile performance. It enables extended battery life and thinner, lighter mobile computers

2002: Intel® Itanium™ 2 Processor

The Itanium™ 2 processor is the second member of the Itanium processor family, a line of enterprise-class processors. The family brings outstanding performance and the volume economics of the Intel® Architecture to the most data-intensive, business-critical and technical computing applications. It provides leading performance for databases, computer-aided engineering, secure online transactions, and more.

2001: Intel® Itanium™ Processor

The Itanium™ processor is the first in a family of 64-bit products from Intel. Designed for high-end, enterprise-class servers and workstations, the processor was built from the ground up with an entirely new architecture based on Intel's Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) design technology. The processor delivers world-class performance for the most demanding enterprise and high-performance computing applications, including e-Commerce security transactions, large databases, mechanical computer-aided engineering, and sophisticated scientific and engineering computing

2001: Intel® Xeon™ Processor

The Intel® Xeon™ processor is targeted for high-performance and mid-range, dual-processor workstations, dual and multi-processor server configurations coming in the future. The platform offers customers a choice of operating systems and applications, along with high performance at affordable prices. Intel Xeon processor-based workstations are expected to achieve performance increases between 30 and 90 percent over systems featuring Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ processors depending on applications and configurations. The processor is based on the Intel NetBurst™ architecture, which is designed to deliver the processing power needed for video and audio applications, advanced Internet technologies, and complex 3-D graphics.

2000: Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor

Users of Intel® Pentium® 4 processor-based PCs can create professional-quality movies; deliver TV-like video via the Internet; communicate with real-time video and voice; render 3D graphics in real time; quickly encode music for MP3 players; and simultaneously run several multimedia applications while connected to the Internet. The processor debuted with 42 million transistors and circuit lines of 0.18 microns. Intel's first microprocessor, the 4004, ran at 108 kilohertz (108,000 hertz), compared to the Intel® Pentium® 4 processor's initial speed of 1.5 gigahertz (1.5 billion hertz). If automobile speed had increased similarly over the same period, you could now drive from San Francisco to New York in about 13 seconds.

1999: Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ Processor

The Intel® Pentium III Xeon processor extends Intel's offerings to the workstation and server market segments, providing additional performance for e-Commerce applications and advanced business computing. The processors incorporate the Intel® Pentium III processor's 70 SIMD instructions, which enhance multimedia and streaming video applications. The Intel® Pentium III Xeon processor's advance cache technology speeds information from the system bus to the processor, significantly boosting performance. It is designed for systems with multiprocessor configurations.