Re:Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM
by TheOtherHobbes on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @08:41PM
(#43627847)
The most powerful 360/91 was roughly equivalent to a 20MHz 486 from the early 90s.
Mainframes had much more powerful distributed IO for multiple hard drives, tape systems and such.
But the CPUs were really not all that powerful at all.
Many people wildly underestimate just how insanely fast and power-efficient today's commodity computing is compared to high-end supercomputing from earlier decades.
A Raspberry Pi destroys any supercomputer earlier than around 1990, and gives some later models a run for their money.
An Apple S7 watch processor is maybe 25X faster than a Pi 5.
Mainframes had much more powerful distributed IO for multiple hard drives, tape systems and such.
But the CPUs were really not all that powerful at all.
Many people wildly underestimate just how insanely fast and power-efficient today's commodity computing is compared to high-end supercomputing from earlier decades.
A Raspberry Pi destroys any supercomputer earlier than around 1990, and gives some later models a run for their money.
An Apple S7 watch processor is maybe 25X faster than a Pi 5.
And so on.