Fujitsu has contributed technology to supercomputers for many years and even if we can’t find its processors in any home PCs it has released some really extreme chips over the years. It has now presented the fastest yet, in fact the fastest processor in the world, in the form of the Venus CPU. It sports performance of 128 billion calculations per second. Fujitsu held the title of the world’s fastest CPU ten years back, but has since then been floating in the backwaters of Intel.
The new circuit code-named Venus will raise the bar substantially. The processor is 2.5 times faster than the previous record holder from Intel.
But Fujitsu hasn’t just made progress in terms of raw performance. Through its miniaturization technology Venus features twice as many cores in a chip measuring 20mm. Venus now houses eight dies in each chip compared to the previous four. Thanks to 45nm technology the new processor consumes only a third of the power of current competing chips.
Venus is also known as SPARC64 VIIIfx and looks to be used in a supercomputer at Institute of Physical and Chemical Science, RIKEN, Japan. The intended peak performance of this supercomputer was not mentioned, but tens of thousands of Venus processors is just waiting to be used before the computer will go online before the end of 2010.
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