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A comment on IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transactional memory.. Parent comment

Re:IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transa... by bryanlarsen on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @07:21AM (#4447983)
Nice rant, but All 4 of your examples are supercomputers, not mainframes. A supercomputer is optimized for absolute performance. A mainframe is optimized for reliability and guaranteed performance. With a supercomputer if you get a soft error on a block, you retry the block. On a mainframe, it's too late.
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Re:IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transa... by PaulHoule on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @08:45AM (#4448191)
More to the point, mainframes are designed for very good performance on commercial applications -- often database applications that aren't too different from what you could knock together with PHP and MySQL except the names of the tools are different.
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Re:IBM unveils z-series with 5.5 GHz CPU and hardware transa... by carlesfe on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @11:05AM (#4448901)
Yes, yes, of course. My point is that even traditional mainframes users are now moving towards regular supercomputers, because of its convenience.
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