IBM z10

The z10 is a microprocessor chip made by IBM for their System z10 mainframe computers, released February 26, 2008.

The chip measures 21.7×20.0 mm and consists of 993 million transistors fabricated in IBM's 65 nm SOI fabrication process (CMOS 11S), supporting speeds of 4.4 GHz and above – more than twice the clock speed as former mainframes – with a 15 FO4 cycle.

However, the processors are quite dissimilar in other respects, such as cache hierarchy and coherency, SMP topology and protocol, and chip organization.

Additions to the z/Architecture from the previous z9 EC processor include: Error detection and recovery is emphasized, with error-correcting code (ECC) on L2 and L3 caches and buffers, and extensive parity checking elsewhere; in all over 20,000 error checkers on the chip.

On the System z10 Enterprise Class (EC) the z10 processors and the Storage Control (SC) chips are mounted on multi-chip modules (MCMs).