The Gigahertz war is over ..nobody told IBM's new 5.2Ghz processor

The Z-series mainframes are going to get the option of the new Z196 processor that has the surprising clock speed of 5.2GHz. The Z196 is a 45nm PD SOI chip which adds up to almost one and a half billion transistors.

It also carries a 64KB Level 1 instruction cache, 1.5MB of private L2 cache per core, a 128K Level 1 data cache and even a pair of co-processors dedicated to doing cryptographic work.

The high clock speed also comes with a high cost. It is expected to be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and might even reach a million bucks per unit.