World Fastest Processor

Science keeps chugging along. When I was in high school I recall one of my teachers saying that the progression of science isn't an arithmetic progression; instead, it is a geometric progression. In other words, it isn't linear in the 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 fashion, instead it is 1 squared (1^2) to 2 squared (2^2) to 3 squared (3^2), so on and so forth.

And now, one of my favorite research operations in the world has developed the fastest processor in the world. Watch for the part in the block quote to see just how fast this thing is:

"The 5-billion-instructions-per second Power6 processor from IBM would beat such rivals as the 3.73 gigahertz Pentium Extreme and the 2.4 gigahertz UltraSparc T2 from Sun. 'It's hard to make the average person understand just how fast this is,' said IBM Chief Technology Officer Bernard Meyerson, offering an example meant to explain his company's baby that still leaves the listener awed with the speediness of the two laggards. 'Hold your index finger out in front of your face,' Meyerson said in a telephone interview from IBM headquarters in New York. 'In less time than it would take a beam of light to travel from your knuckle to your fingertip, the new IBM chip would complete one task and start looking for the next, he said.'"

Original IBM text here.

News article here.