Fujitsu shows off world's fastest CPU

Japan takes back performance crown from the USA

18 May 2009 10:23 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Fujitsu has revealed what it claims to be the fastest chip in the world. Its new SPARC64 VIIIfx processor, which is codenamed "Venus", clocks 128 billion computations per second. It's the first time in a decade that a Japanese company has taken the fastest chip performance accolade.

Venus is still in development, but it's fabricated using a 45nm process. Eight cores are crammed into two square centimetres, along with an integrated memory controller, and power consumption that's a third of rival Intel's fastest chip.

The company admits that it'll take several years for it to move the processor out of the lab and into real computers, but says that it could see use in weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research, astronomy and other modelling-heavy scientific research.