So they released a new one, up to 96 processing units per mainframe. Running at 5.2Ghz, 128kB Data and 64KB Instruction per core of L1 cache, 1.5Mb per core of L2 catch, 24Mbytes of DRAM as L3 cache per processing unit. And finally a 192Mbytes of L4 catch which is shared between 5 processing units. Plus a total system memory (RAM) of up to 3TBs. So long harddrives, say hello to Terabytes of RAM.

If that was not enough, processing power is pretty impressive. At about 521,000 million instructions per PU, or 130,000 million instructions per core.

The Brand new Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE, manages in its 6 cores to squeeze out 148,000 million instructions per second, just above the single core of the z196. At about 44 instructions per cycle verses the z196 which does 100 instructions per cycle.

I wonder if IBM would sell a developer board with a single z196 and motherboard?

Dimitri

There's an old Internet saying for such things as this.


WANT.

Can you program it at it's lowest level to take advantage of the speed? This is why I am a fan of the 6502, because we can.

Such machinery though is sweet to dream about, if only...

_________________
65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

There are 1,079 assembly level instructions available for you to use. Built upon the System/360 instructions over time. I'm sure if there is a thing you want to do, they probably got a direct low level command for it.

Dimitri

I wonder if IBM would sell a developer board with a single z196 and motherboard? :lol:

Dimitri

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Their price for one processor is well over $100,000

John Eaton

Actually, from the looks of things, a "single" processor mainframe will be around the half a million mark. However, in that mainframe there will be up to 15 more processors waiting for a execution code from IBM for "On demand" computing.

You buy a single processor mainframe, but it comes with redundant cores the OS doesn't use, both for back ups and for on demand computing. So the over all costs of the individual processor is hard to judge, especially considering all the rest of the support hardware in the system such as redundant power supplies, hard drives, RAM, I/O backplanes and the like that come installed whether you buy a single processor or all 96 of them.

I've read the "fully loaded" 96 processor system will be in the neighborhood of 3-5 million dollars. Which comes out to anywhere from 30,000$ to 50,000$ per processor including all the support hardware (about 31GBs of RAM per processor alone).

Dimitri

Mainframes are one of the few markets where hand-assembled code for high performance transaction processing exists. You don't get to boast billions of transactions processed per second on single- to quad-core processor-based mainframes (e.g., S/390) without it.