Reports from Japan say that a new supercomputer processor has taken the crown of world's fastest by not just beating, but obliterating the old record.

Fujitsu's eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx Venus CPU was clocked at 128 billion computations per second, which destroyed the previous Intel-held record by a factor of 2.5.

Energy efficient

The new processor is both smaller and more energy-efficient than its predecessors thanks to smaller core components.

The 128-gigaflops chip is based on 45nm circuitry, compared to Intel's 90nm processes on the Itanium 2 chips that had held the record.

However, the US firm says it is also moving to 45nm for the next Itanium, so Fujitsu appears to have a fight on its hands in the brewing supercomputer war.

Update: Looks like we have some debate in the comments below, partly because the Xbitlabs source appears to be down, thereby making corroborating data a little thin on the ground.

Suffice it to say, we've given you what detail we can gather on a weekend and there'll be scope to return to the Venus CPU when Fujitsu spills all the beans in future.