Next Week's Bloodbath At IBM Won't Fix The Real Problem

Re:Next Week's Bloodbath At IBM Won't Fix The Real Problem by bane on Sunday January 25, 2015 @08:34PM (#8945130)

I have practically zero experience with mainframes, but I've always heard about their insane throughput figures. I've never really seen much on their architecture. Any insight in how they work and do so much?

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Re:Next Week's Bloodbath At IBM Won't Fix The Real Problem by filereaper on Sunday January 25, 2015 @09:17PM (#8945245)

Here's an old 2012 article about zEC12 (previous) generation of the mainframe. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/05/ibm_z12_mainframe_en... zEC13 was just released this year.

The mainframes have their own CISC type architecture and typically have massive amounts of cache and a high clock speed (5Ghz and above)

Their instructions sets are also different in that its not strictly of the von-Neumann variety. Mainframes can do things like memory copies directly in memory without requiring copying via registers. This kind-of attacks the von-Neumann bottleneck directly and is good for batch and high volume transaction processing.

The software for mainframes is also typically fused into their kernels, things like CICS and DB2 are not "user" programs, they're part of the OS so I/O is handled much better and things don't "block" as much.

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