IBM Reveals World's Fastest Microprocessor: z196

[g00ey]

Yeah, it is obvious that Xbox, Playstation, and Apple are not the only entities that are defended fanbois. *big sigh*

 

[Guest]

btanoue and wotan are quite correct - z-series mainframes are designed for heavy-lift commercial workloads requiring hundreds/thousands of online transactions per second or batch work where millions of accounts need to be processed in a short timeframe. The ability to drive massive amounts of disk I/O rapidly is another distinguishing feature, as is very high availability/uptime. Regarding bang-for-the-buck, an honest assessment of TCO - Total Cost of Ownership - would find z-series machines very attractive, for the same reason that a professional excavator finds Kenworth and Peterbilt more attractive than a GMC Sierra for moving dirt. It's not cost per se, but cost per unit of work accomplished that counts...and mainframes accomplish a lot.

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

[citation][nom]iam2thecrowe[/nom]so...all those specs are nice, but can someone give me a comparison?? faster than an intel 8 core??? 2 intel 8 cores?[/citation]Why are you people so naive????

These chips are in a entirely different league, with an entirely different architecture than an intel/AMD cpu...

 

[the_brute]

I love this tech site. Trying to compare desktop CPUs to mainframe CPUs. Wow.

 

[Guest]

Will be interesting to see if this type of system architecture is still economically viable in the coming years as GPU computing takes more ground.

 

[lauxenburg]

L4 cache? =o?

 

[iam2thecrowe]

[citation][nom]blackened144[/nom]I would be interested in seeing how it compares to the clusters we are running here at work. In 2 racks we run 160 servers - Quad Xeons with 12gb mem each, thats 640cores and 1.92TB of mem compared to the possible 96cores and 3TB RAIM from IBM.[/citation]

They have IBM Blade servers that already compare to what you have, those things are great. So I would hope this mainframe thing would be better....right???

 

[dorker]

There will be a time when we look back on this processor like we remember room-filling mainframes.

 

[boofman]

[citation][nom]dEAne[/nom]I promise I will buy two one for my foundation and one for my business.[/citation]

me too..if the weather would allow..

 

[Wheat_Thins]

[citation][nom]phatboe[/nom]What exactly are these Z-Series mainframes used for and what OS is it running?[/citation]

The Z-series run OS400 by default. You can buy windows emulator cards but they are only allowed to use the X86 based processors built into the cards but can access the insane database capabilities without leaving the same box. OS400 is pretty old but is used in so many places that people don't even realize. Ever peek at a hospital screen from behind the counter I am willing to bet that 95% of the time its an OS400 terminal. We have not rebooted our iseries since 2007. Ugly to look at, amazing uptime.

 

[palladin9479]

Mainframes represent the opposite end of the computing spectrum. The other end is distributed computing with multiple-node / VMware style computing being somewhere in the center. It all depends what your requirements are. Different people / business's have different problems and require different solutions.

The problem with anything big iron IBM is the expense, its not commodity and each site would require engineering services on top of the HW cost, then the licensing issues. Most business's don't need a specialized / programmed mainframe, instead they would do better with commodity HW with fail-over capability / redundancy. Using banks / hospitals is a bad example, both of those institutions rely on very ancient software written for IBM mainframes a long time ago. The price / and risk potential to upgrade to a completely new system is simply to high. A single lost minute to a major Bank due to a "computer glitch" of a new system can cost tens of thousands if not millions depending on the severity and the timing. For hospitals people can die if a computer glitch cause's a record change. Its the very proof of "if it ain't broke don't fit it".

 

[hawkwindeb]

[citation][nom]wotan31[/nom]Oh, and I should add that these most definitely reach well into the Seven figure price range. But it's justified, since they have features that no other computers have. You can partition this machine into smaller machines, each running their own OS instance. Right about now, you're thinking "so what, I can do that with VMware". Well, no you cant - the zSeries does full hardware and power isolation on these partitions. So I can power down one partition, swap CPU's and memory, swap the back plane, etc. without affecting the other partitions I have set up. Full electrical isolation. Also, you can allocate and remove memory, CPU's, and even PCIe busses to/from a running partition! The OS is smart enough that you can tell it Ok, here's 8 more CPU cores, start using them. No reboot required. And you can later take those cores away and give them to another OS running in another partition. Same with RAM, same with I/O busses. The only other machines that even come close, are the HP Superdome, and the Tandem Himalaya. Those two also have 7 figure price tags.[/citation]

Well, you forgot about Sun now Oracle M8000 and M9000 and their predecessors like the E10K, 12K/15K, and E20K/E25K which all have the electrically isolated partitions called Dynamic Domains which allows moving CPU's, Memory, etc to another partition without having to stop or bring down the Operating System which is Solaris and also have Zones/Containers in the OS to further partition. The M-Series have instruction-level-retry in HW in the CPU as well as no single point of failure, Memory-Mirroring (ie: RAID1 for memory), etc. Many other features to numerous to mention. So, the M8000 and M9000 have everything you mentioned.

 

[Guest]

More like Real Time Computing, or hand signs on exchange floor, to the server cards. Memory register price and I/O are transactions by volume.