Why, despite IBM claims POWER performance was never really exceptional or even offering a tangible lead over x86, and at prices that make it very poor value product.
performance just has to be competitive, not exceptional. And prices would be lower if they produced and sold more for PCs. Competition is good for everyone.
It won't do much good without software. It would take a considerable software base to make a useful platform. Just look at linux, it rules servers, supercomputers, mobiles, but it sucks for things like content creation or engineering, because there is just no prosumer software for it. And it's still x86, just different OS.
Now imagine throwing in a different platform in that equation. The effort that would be needed to catch up on the software size will dwarf the hardware development of the platform in the last 10 years.
Do you really think that Maya, Arnold, Houdini, Modo, Mudbox, Softimage(RIP), Indigo, Nuke, Katana etc (all professional proprietary software, used extensively in Hollywood films and many computer games, among others, without even mentioning the open source usual suspects - Blender, POV-Ray etc) support Linux just for the heck of it? Or that it might be possible that CGI studios often prefer to model, render, and animate on Linux machines?
But that isn't exactly apples to apples. Power8 tended to have a much higher power budget than Ivy-EX. For instance, Skylake-X has much higher performance when you are willing to give it 300W per chip than 150W per chip.
-- And with barely any software aside from *cough* "enterprise java"...
well, that's not really true. the slide did call out COBOL optimization. IIRC in the 360 days (or early 370, I forget) they expanded the instruction set to provide "COBOL assist". looks like they still are. and DB2 on z is a very thin wrapper over VSAM. good thing for IBM that software doesn't actually wear out. I read a story in the early '90s about a 360/30 still printing checks for some company. didn't do anything else, of course.
This is not at all clear. CAN you even give Skylake-X 300W?
More generally let's try to stick with comments that explain, not comments that excuse. IBM is targeting a market which is willing to pay an awful lot for what it gets; and among other things, the power usage of these cores pales in comparison to the power usage of the attached memory and IO. That means it makes sense for IBM to design a high-power core; the limitation is how high can the cooling system go, NOT how can we save power.
Intel is trying to use much the same design in everything from 5W tablets to multi-socket monsters, and using much the same design everywhere has consequences --- like you don't design a system that can run as fast and as hot. This is an EXPLANATION for Intel's choices, but it doesn't change the fact that each company made the choices it did, and IBM's choices DO result in higher performance for some set of target applications that IBM cares about a lot.
Z is its own CPU architecture that is an evolution of a long line of CISC mainframe CPUs by IBM. Power is a RISC CPU, although the CISC/RISC distinction nowadays is very blurry.
Perhaps not, but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. System Z remains compatible with previous mainframes all the way back to System 360 and many customers still run ancient software.
may be. may be not. with the replacement of ISA on the metal with "micro-architecture" and deep decoders, only the very front ends need be different. after all, when was the last time a new ALU design happened?
The PC business has stagnated. IBM has no intention of trying to enter it with their Power architecture. They are trying to get Power into data centers, though.
Hopefully the 14nm+ that AMD has shown on its roadmaps for 2018 is the 14nm SOI that IBM is using. I would guess sizable clock gains would be number 1 benefit.
The current SOI (e.g. 22FDX) is incompatible with FinFETS. They're in two different worlds, so to say. Converting would cause a major redesign effort, completely redoing the physical layout.
-- IBM is not the only vendor building them (although it is the dominant one.)
but, IIRC, only the 360/370/390/z ISA is implemented on all the others, Burroughs possibly excepted. Unisys bought up the dregs years ago, and the MCP machines are in limbo.
Fujitsu and Hitachi are both IBM compatible (more or less.) Fujitsu has a roadmap going through 2030 with new hardware every couple years. Hitachi is going to rebadging IBM systems, starting next year. Fujitsu historically is about on par with IBM in Japan, with product cycles causing IBM or Fujitsu to gain temporary sales boosts over each other. They also have a German mainframe business they inherited from Siemens, which does okay. Hitachi's business is smaller.
NEC has mainframes with several generations roadmapped. These are most assuredly not IBM compatible; they're distant relatives of Bull's (mostly-dead) DPS-7 mainframe family. NEC made an abortive attempt to move to emulation, which sold badly, but is now firmly back in the hardware game and has had 20-25% mainframe market share in Japan.
Bull (now Atos) and Unisys both remain in the mainframe OS business but have exited mainframe hardware. Both do emulation on x86, and neither have platforms that are 360-related. Bull's systems, especially the older one (GCOS 8) are effectively in maintenance mode, with small customer bases (mostly in France.) Unisys continues to throw meaningful development resources at MCP and OS 2200, and they do pretty well, especially in the US or Latin America; in the US, if a company is running non-IBM mainframe operating systems, it's almost certainly Unisys.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. tl;dr version: IBM is dominant but not the only one - especially in Japan.
No need to apologize. The one-in-a-hundred comment that contains actual content is the only reason to wade through the other ninety nine!
That Japan situation is bizarre, especially when you throw in that Fujitsu also makes HPC SPARC designs and is soon going to be making HPC ARM designs, Maybe that's why Japan is so wimpy is software --- every CS-competent engineer they produce goes into make yet another hardware variant?!
For some context, there was a lot of government and quasi-government (NTT) support for the domestic computer industry in Japan. Originally, there were even more, with the vendors organized into pairs: Hitachi/Fujitsu worked together on IBM clones, often in collaboration with Amdahl; NEC and Toshiba worked on derivatives of Honeywell/Bull's GCOS lines; Oki and Mitsubishi cloned, if I recall, the same RCA product line that got recycled into Univac VS/9 and Siemens BS2000 - but that's the one I know the least about, so don't take it as gospel.
Fujitsu and Hitachi ultimately diverged (a friend of mine, who worked in their mainframe unit, called it a "very messy divorce" without elaborating.) NEC bought out Toshiba's mainframe line and continues alone to the present day. Somewhere, the Oki/Mitsubishi mainframe partnership seems to have fallen apart, and Mitsubishi ended up shipping IBM clones and later IBM rebadges running a Mitsubishi OS, but afaik they're long since out of that business.
On top of all that, Japanese companies often have a real preference for local vendors - which is why you see Hitachi rebadging HPE's Itanium boxes, for instance. Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC are *not* necessarily trying to compete with z directly on performance or scalability, but they have a customer base that likes their products, so improvements continue. Hitachi's systems, for instance, top out at 8 cores and 64GB RAM, afaik.
By the way, of the Japanese vendors, Fujitsu is the only one i know of with any kind of real mainframe customer base internationally (running BS2000 in Europe, and some MSP/XSP in Australia.)
What was that about lies, damn lies and statistics? 91% of CEOs say "new customer facing apps are accessing the mainframe?" Is that because most CIOs are incompetent?
No, most large companies still run mainframes. I'm guessing another decade before this dies back as the tech that gives you uptime better than mainframe is still pretty new in the grand scheme. Thinks like pivotal cloud factory, or clustered databases like Mongo DB, Cassandra etc.
Large companies make up a very small percentage of the total number of companies. Banks, airline reservation systems and government agencies, I'm guessing. I've been writing "apps" for 21 years at more than 15 companies (including contract gigs) and have never worked for a company that had a mainframe. I know that's anecdotal, but still.
-- I'm guessing another decade before this dies back as the tech that gives you uptime better than mainframe is still pretty new in the grand scheme.
well, mainframes were processing "big data" sets with 6 9s reliability decades ago and which none of the X86/ARM/etc. chips can match today. java lipstick on a pig has been going on since at least 2001, when I got sucked into one such mess.
No, because it’s true. Despite the movement years ago to replace mainframes with the so called distributed computing frameworks, it was quickly found to be a pretty terrible idea. Mainframes made a comeback after that. You don’t need to sell that many of them a year. IBM sells a few thousand a year, starting in the low single digit millions.
Just informed. If your app accepts a credit card payment and I assume you check that it is an active card, then your customer facing app is using a mainframe. The cio just needs 1 app out of all apps for the stat to be correct.
Using their technical manual I tried to calculate the instructions per second on the monster z14 CPU and it came out to almost exactly the same as the Xeon Platinum 8180. The difference is that the z14 has huge caches so it probably has the edge in plenty of workloads. Of course this was a rather unscientific calculation (and IPS is already a rough perf metric), but finding benchmarks for IBM cpus is quite difficult.
Mainframes have been about bandwidth and concurrency which is hard to figure out from specs. That and they dedicate silicone to making the old legacy code run faster along with accelerating certain things like cryptography and compression. They are a dying breed that is for sure but tons of companies I know use them still as they done want to convert there legacy code that and since you have one you can run Linux VM's off of them as well.
You can’t evaluate a mainframe that way. Total computing resources are much greater than with anything else. Did you read how many chips can be in one, and how many cores per chip?
I/O is a major difference as well. These are just not comparable to a pc, or even a high end workstation. Don’t even bother.
That's like boasting that a miata can go faster than an 18-wheeler. It's true, but so what? If you need an 18-wheeler, you buy an 18-wheeler. And if you don't know why you need an 18-wheeler, then you're not in that market.
You are not buying these machines based on their FLOPs or MIPs, you are buying them based on a combination of security, capacity, endless compatibility, and platinum quality service.
I know all of this, but I still wanted to know the performance details, of which there are virtually none. At some point we are still talking about transistors and instructions, and I find the z14 CPU fascinating. The comparison to the 8180 (and yes, I kept in mind cores/cpu and such) was just to give a rough idea of the processing capabilities, obviously Xeon is not the same market.
Still, if the rough calculation has enough truth in it to be useful, really cool that the z14 can keep up with Intel's top of the line 10 grand monster processor (actually 13 grand for the 8180m, since z14 has no problem with memory sizes) while besting it with all kinds of goodies for mainframe use. Also appears to be a much smaller die size, and they fit 6 into a drawer with another powerful CPU just for I/O.
I think if you really did do a very scientifically accurate comparison, the z14 would compare quite well to anything else on the market. Of course the overall cost is probably much higher too.
The 18-wheeler vs. miata analogy doesn't work, because you can still quantify with numbers the things an 18-wheeler can do that a miata cannot, and vice versa, and this would be very interesting if you knew very little about one of them.
Critical things to know is that these machines can run with 100% load for years and single threaded performance per core can be from 3-15 times more powerful than x86 (depending on application).
That power range of 300 or even 500 watts at 5.2GHz seems ridiculously high. I wonder what the optimal clock frequency for this process is and how much of that power draw is used just for the last tiny percentage of performance. I guess the massive cooling is there to allow for what amounts to a factory overclock and the redundancy reduces the risk of early death as a result of it.
Power9 was presented last year. Power10 is roadmapped for 2019-2020, so it's a little early; maybe it will be presented next year, but 2019 is more likely.
Thanks for going to this one Ian, since it's really fascinating to see how mainframe tech keeps advancing quietly in the background without much fanfare, and it's tech driven from such a different origin than say a now typical workstation or server base.
I think many people still have the idea that mainframes are these dinosaurs that must be replaced by something more modern, because some old crusty program was written before people knew better or something. It's pretty fun to see everyone comments really grasping on what the Z "platform" actually is, or indeed what mainframes were/are other than some legacy boogieman in the IT closet.
Also, hah I love that you explicitly point out "this isn't about Power" and... 90% comment thread is about Power. Probably because that's the closest IBM plat/tech that is familiar to those who've never seen mainframe. Just interesting.
I really bad analogy I think, is a mainframe is like... a huge ASIC dedicated to running your company's IT backbone, with stupid high uptime and availability. Basically you could put a rifle round through a Z platform box during the building collapse and assuming it still had power it would not go down. Fascinating tech.
Also I should have said something about accelerated backward compatibility in my horrible analogy - the programming and hardware developed to do that is what's amazing if anyone does delve into that. I didn't want to give the impression that being a mainframe is "just" about being high-availability.
Not trying to be a mainframe fanboy - I grew up as x86 became of age as a serious option to consider from an age of time-sharing systems, and it was pretty awesome how suddenly the "terminal" on your desk could suddenly start doing so much more on it's own w/o needing to worry about getting a time slice from IT.
Remembering an article in a PC magazine ages ago that mentioned some of the mainframe technology that did trickle down, but a lot that didn't, in explaining why PCs of the time weren't so reliable. PCs have gotten much better, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
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takeshi7 - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a Power Mac G6 or a POWER based Windows PC. I've been waiting since 2005. Don't let me down IBM.ddriver - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
Why, despite IBM claims POWER performance was never really exceptional or even offering a tangible lead over x86, and at prices that make it very poor value product.takeshi7 - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
performance just has to be competitive, not exceptional. And prices would be lower if they produced and sold more for PCs. Competition is good for everyone.ddriver - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
It won't do much good without software. It would take a considerable software base to make a useful platform. Just look at linux, it rules servers, supercomputers, mobiles, but it sucks for things like content creation or engineering, because there is just no prosumer software for it. And it's still x86, just different OS.Now imagine throwing in a different platform in that equation. The effort that would be needed to catch up on the software size will dwarf the hardware development of the platform in the last 10 years.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Linux is heavily used in workstations in the animation industry.Santoval - Saturday, August 26, 2017 - link
Do you really think that Maya, Arnold, Houdini, Modo, Mudbox, Softimage(RIP), Indigo, Nuke, Katana etc (all professional proprietary software, used extensively in Hollywood films and many computer games, among others, without even mentioning the open source usual suspects - Blender, POV-Ray etc) support Linux just for the heck of it? Or that it might be possible that CGI studios often prefer to model, render, and animate on Linux machines?AmeliaPerry - Monday, August 28, 2017 - link
Read following report to learn how a single mom was able to make $89,844/year in her spare time on her computer without ........ http://cutt.us/4DDiGmichael2k - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
While what you say is technically true, ARM is more likely than POWER to be in a PC or MacSarahKerrigan - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
Power wins by quite a bit for some loads, especially per-core. 12c Power8 vs 15c Ivy-EX when P8 launched tended to show big wins for Power8.ats - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
But that isn't exactly apples to apples. Power8 tended to have a much higher power budget than Ivy-EX. For instance, Skylake-X has much higher performance when you are willing to give it 300W per chip than 150W per chip.ddriver - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Exactly, if you account of cost and power, performance is actually disappointing. And with barely any software aside from *cough* "enterprise java"...FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
-- And with barely any software aside from *cough* "enterprise java"...well, that's not really true. the slide did call out COBOL optimization. IIRC in the 360 days (or early 370, I forget) they expanded the instruction set to provide "COBOL assist". looks like they still are. and DB2 on z is a very thin wrapper over VSAM. good thing for IBM that software doesn't actually wear out. I read a story in the early '90s about a 360/30 still printing checks for some company. didn't do anything else, of course.
melgross - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
It’s actually quite good. But it isn’t intended for cheap machines. Even a $5,000 Windows machine is cheap, really, in this context.name99 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
This is not at all clear. CAN you even give Skylake-X 300W?More generally let's try to stick with comments that explain, not comments that excuse.
IBM is targeting a market which is willing to pay an awful lot for what it gets; and among other things, the power usage of these cores pales in comparison to the power usage of the attached memory and IO. That means it makes sense for IBM to design a high-power core; the limitation is how high can the cooling system go, NOT how can we save power.
Intel is trying to use much the same design in everything from 5W tablets to multi-socket monsters, and using much the same design everywhere has consequences --- like you don't design a system that can run as fast and as hot. This is an EXPLANATION for Intel's choices, but it doesn't change the fact that each company made the choices it did, and IBM's choices DO result in higher performance for some set of target applications that IBM cares about a lot.
melgross - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Power performance has always been excellent, but it’s expensive. That’s the real problem.SarahKerrigan - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
z is not Power.Lord-Bryan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
So what is z, doesn't it still use power architecture & coresLorfa - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Z is its own CPU architecture that is an evolution of a long line of CISC mainframe CPUs by IBM. Power is a RISC CPU, although the CISC/RISC distinction nowadays is very blurry.Lord-Bryan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Is it really wise to own two architecture since you will have to spend twice to maintain them both.latentexistence - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Perhaps not, but they're stuck with it for backwards compatibility. System Z remains compatible with previous mainframes all the way back to System 360 and many customers still run ancient software.SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
They're complementary. z is highly profitable and, from what I've heard, subsidizes Power development.narmermenes - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
I think the the presentation stated several times that z is a mainframe CPU to enhance IBM's mainframe business.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
-- spend twice to maintain them bothmay be. may be not. with the replacement of ISA on the metal with "micro-architecture" and deep decoders, only the very front ends need be different. after all, when was the last time a new ALU design happened?
melgross - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Two totally different purposes. Sometimes one thing doesn’t fit all use cases.Yojimbo - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
The PC business has stagnated. IBM has no intention of trying to enter it with their Power architecture. They are trying to get Power into data centers, though.tipoo - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
If macOS transitions to an ISA anytime soon, 99% it would be ARM. I see no reason to flip back to Power on the consumer side.rbanffy - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/SunnyNW - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
Hopefully the 14nm+ that AMD has shown on its roadmaps for 2018 is the 14nm SOI that IBM is using. I would guess sizable clock gains would be number 1 benefit.Lord-Bryan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Yeah, with 17 metal layers am sure zen might reach 4.5ghz, but amd will have to spend millions to redesign masks. so not going to happen.MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
The current SOI (e.g. 22FDX) is incompatible with FinFETS. They're in two different worlds, so to say. Converting would cause a major redesign effort, completely redoing the physical layout.beginner99 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
I would like to say I wonder who buys these systems. But then my daily work involves interacting with an Oracle DB running on IBM AIX...FreckledTrout - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Oracle 12c runs great on IBM Power8 and AIX7. We have a lot of that here too....SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Banks. Insurers. Airlines.Mainframes are not uncommon, and IBM is not the only vendor building them (although it is the dominant one.)
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
-- IBM is not the only vendor building them (although it is the dominant one.)but, IIRC, only the 360/370/390/z ISA is implemented on all the others, Burroughs possibly excepted. Unisys bought up the dregs years ago, and the MCP machines are in limbo.
SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Fujitsu and Hitachi are both IBM compatible (more or less.) Fujitsu has a roadmap going through 2030 with new hardware every couple years. Hitachi is going to rebadging IBM systems, starting next year. Fujitsu historically is about on par with IBM in Japan, with product cycles causing IBM or Fujitsu to gain temporary sales boosts over each other. They also have a German mainframe business they inherited from Siemens, which does okay. Hitachi's business is smaller.NEC has mainframes with several generations roadmapped. These are most assuredly not IBM compatible; they're distant relatives of Bull's (mostly-dead) DPS-7 mainframe family. NEC made an abortive attempt to move to emulation, which sold badly, but is now firmly back in the hardware game and has had 20-25% mainframe market share in Japan.
Bull (now Atos) and Unisys both remain in the mainframe OS business but have exited mainframe hardware. Both do emulation on x86, and neither have platforms that are 360-related. Bull's systems, especially the older one (GCOS 8) are effectively in maintenance mode, with small customer bases (mostly in France.) Unisys continues to throw meaningful development resources at MCP and OS 2200, and they do pretty well, especially in the US or Latin America; in the US, if a company is running non-IBM mainframe operating systems, it's almost certainly Unisys.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. tl;dr version: IBM is dominant but not the only one - especially in Japan.
name99 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
No need to apologize.The one-in-a-hundred comment that contains actual content is the only reason to wade through the other ninety nine!
That Japan situation is bizarre, especially when you throw in that Fujitsu also makes HPC SPARC designs and is soon going to be making HPC ARM designs,
Maybe that's why Japan is so wimpy is software --- every CS-competent engineer they produce goes into make yet another hardware variant?!
SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
I'm glad you appreciate it!For some context, there was a lot of government and quasi-government (NTT) support for the domestic computer industry in Japan. Originally, there were even more, with the vendors organized into pairs: Hitachi/Fujitsu worked together on IBM clones, often in collaboration with Amdahl; NEC and Toshiba worked on derivatives of Honeywell/Bull's GCOS lines; Oki and Mitsubishi cloned, if I recall, the same RCA product line that got recycled into Univac VS/9 and Siemens BS2000 - but that's the one I know the least about, so don't take it as gospel.
Fujitsu and Hitachi ultimately diverged (a friend of mine, who worked in their mainframe unit, called it a "very messy divorce" without elaborating.) NEC bought out Toshiba's mainframe line and continues alone to the present day. Somewhere, the Oki/Mitsubishi mainframe partnership seems to have fallen apart, and Mitsubishi ended up shipping IBM clones and later IBM rebadges running a Mitsubishi OS, but afaik they're long since out of that business.
On top of all that, Japanese companies often have a real preference for local vendors - which is why you see Hitachi rebadging HPE's Itanium boxes, for instance. Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC are *not* necessarily trying to compete with z directly on performance or scalability, but they have a customer base that likes their products, so improvements continue. Hitachi's systems, for instance, top out at 8 cores and 64GB RAM, afaik.
By the way, of the Japanese vendors, Fujitsu is the only one i know of with any kind of real mainframe customer base internationally (running BS2000 in Europe, and some MSP/XSP in Australia.)
Again, I apologize for the text wall. :-)
jospoortvliet - Wednesday, August 30, 2017 - link
Thanks for the interesting comments!!!SFoster4 - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link
RCA did become Univac VS/9. I worked on conversions from VS/9 to OS1100 in the early 80's.sorten - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
What was that about lies, damn lies and statistics? 91% of CEOs say "new customer facing apps are accessing the mainframe?" Is that because most CIOs are incompetent?FreckledTrout - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
No, most large companies still run mainframes. I'm guessing another decade before this dies back as the tech that gives you uptime better than mainframe is still pretty new in the grand scheme. Thinks like pivotal cloud factory, or clustered databases like Mongo DB, Cassandra etc.sorten - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Large companies make up a very small percentage of the total number of companies. Banks, airline reservation systems and government agencies, I'm guessing. I've been writing "apps" for 21 years at more than 15 companies (including contract gigs) and have never worked for a company that had a mainframe. I know that's anecdotal, but still.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
-- I'm guessing another decade before this dies back as the tech that gives you uptime better than mainframe is still pretty new in the grand scheme.well, mainframes were processing "big data" sets with 6 9s reliability decades ago and which none of the X86/ARM/etc. chips can match today. java lipstick on a pig has been going on since at least 2001, when I got sucked into one such mess.
melgross - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
No, because it’s true. Despite the movement years ago to replace mainframes with the so called distributed computing frameworks, it was quickly found to be a pretty terrible idea. Mainframes made a comeback after that. You don’t need to sell that many of them a year. IBM sells a few thousand a year, starting in the low single digit millions.These are also use heavily by governments.
abcman999 - Sunday, August 27, 2017 - link
Just informed. If your app accepts a credit card payment and I assume you check that it is an active card, then your customer facing app is using a mainframe. The cio just needs 1 app out of all apps for the stat to be correct.Lorfa - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Using their technical manual I tried to calculate the instructions per second on the monster z14 CPU and it came out to almost exactly the same as the Xeon Platinum 8180. The difference is that the z14 has huge caches so it probably has the edge in plenty of workloads. Of course this was a rather unscientific calculation (and IPS is already a rough perf metric), but finding benchmarks for IBM cpus is quite difficult.FreckledTrout - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Mainframes have been about bandwidth and concurrency which is hard to figure out from specs. That and they dedicate silicone to making the old legacy code run faster along with accelerating certain things like cryptography and compression. They are a dying breed that is for sure but tons of companies I know use them still as they done want to convert there legacy code that and since you have one you can run Linux VM's off of them as well.melgross - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
You can’t evaluate a mainframe that way. Total computing resources are much greater than with anything else. Did you read how many chips can be in one, and how many cores per chip?I/O is a major difference as well. These are just not comparable to a pc, or even a high end workstation. Don’t even bother.
name99 - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
That's like boasting that a miata can go faster than an 18-wheeler. It's true, but so what?If you need an 18-wheeler, you buy an 18-wheeler. And if you don't know why you need an 18-wheeler, then you're not in that market.
You are not buying these machines based on their FLOPs or MIPs, you are buying them based on a combination of security, capacity, endless compatibility, and platinum quality service.
Lorfa - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
I know all of this, but I still wanted to know the performance details, of which there are virtually none. At some point we are still talking about transistors and instructions, and I find the z14 CPU fascinating. The comparison to the 8180 (and yes, I kept in mind cores/cpu and such) was just to give a rough idea of the processing capabilities, obviously Xeon is not the same market.Still, if the rough calculation has enough truth in it to be useful, really cool that the z14 can keep up with Intel's top of the line 10 grand monster processor (actually 13 grand for the 8180m, since z14 has no problem with memory sizes) while besting it with all kinds of goodies for mainframe use. Also appears to be a much smaller die size, and they fit 6 into a drawer with another powerful CPU just for I/O.
I think if you really did do a very scientifically accurate comparison, the z14 would compare quite well to anything else on the market. Of course the overall cost is probably much higher too.
The 18-wheeler vs. miata analogy doesn't work, because you can still quantify with numbers the things an 18-wheeler can do that a miata cannot, and vice versa, and this would be very interesting if you knew very little about one of them.
Lorfa - Thursday, August 24, 2017 - link
EDIT: Die size is larger than the 8180, but the package size appears to be substantially smaller.hrvoje - Friday, August 25, 2017 - link
Critical things to know is that these machines can run with 100% load for years and single threaded performance per core can be from 3-15 times more powerful than x86 (depending on application).latentexistence - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
That power range of 300 or even 500 watts at 5.2GHz seems ridiculously high. I wonder what the optimal clock frequency for this process is and how much of that power draw is used just for the last tiny percentage of performance. I guess the massive cooling is there to allow for what amounts to a factory overclock and the redundancy reduces the risk of early death as a result of it.melgross - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Did you see the size of the chips? They’re huge. Power draw isn’t an issue for these machines.narmermenes - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
I would have thunk IBM would have released new details on POWER 9/10 at HCs. Maybe next year.SarahKerrigan - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Power9 was presented last year. Power10 is roadmapped for 2019-2020, so it's a little early; maybe it will be presented next year, but 2019 is more likely.xrror - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Thanks for going to this one Ian, since it's really fascinating to see how mainframe tech keeps advancing quietly in the background without much fanfare, and it's tech driven from such a different origin than say a now typical workstation or server base.I think many people still have the idea that mainframes are these dinosaurs that must be replaced by something more modern, because some old crusty program was written before people knew better or something. It's pretty fun to see everyone comments really grasping on what the Z "platform" actually is, or indeed what mainframes were/are other than some legacy boogieman in the IT closet.
Also, hah I love that you explicitly point out "this isn't about Power" and... 90% comment thread is about Power. Probably because that's the closest IBM plat/tech that is familiar to those who've never seen mainframe. Just interesting.
I really bad analogy I think, is a mainframe is like... a huge ASIC dedicated to running your company's IT backbone, with stupid high uptime and availability. Basically you could put a rifle round through a Z platform box during the building collapse and assuming it still had power it would not go down. Fascinating tech.
xrror - Wednesday, August 23, 2017 - link
Also I should have said something about accelerated backward compatibility in my horrible analogy - the programming and hardware developed to do that is what's amazing if anyone does delve into that. I didn't want to give the impression that being a mainframe is "just" about being high-availability.Not trying to be a mainframe fanboy - I grew up as x86 became of age as a serious option to consider from an age of time-sharing systems, and it was pretty awesome how suddenly the "terminal" on your desk could suddenly start doing so much more on it's own w/o needing to worry about getting a time slice from IT.
Threska - Thursday, August 24, 2017 - link
Remembering an article in a PC magazine ages ago that mentioned some of the mainframe technology that did trickle down, but a lot that didn't, in explaining why PCs of the time weren't so reliable. PCs have gotten much better, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.ShroudedNight - Thursday, August 24, 2017 - link
Thanks for the covering this! It's being well received by several (GC+JIT) devs here on the IBM J9 JVM team.Ian Cutress - Friday, August 25, 2017 - link
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What are kickbacks for purchasing such overpriced hardware which can only run overpriced software?xCalvinx - Tuesday, October 3, 2017 - link
kickbacks are that you cc transactions still work and so are your back account(s)nancy211 - Tuesday, September 26, 2017 - link
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Does this support AIX?GreenReaper - Sunday, June 9, 2019 - link
An old version of AIX/ESA under z/VM, perhaps? Though I've no idea where you'd get it from.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX#IBM_mainfram...
(In theory you could run it natively, but I'm not sure if it requires ESA/390 architecture mode, which was removed after z13: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSL... - let alone any drivers for newer hardware.)
A post on r/mainframe suggests that if you want to run AIX, you should be using POWER:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mainframe/comments/9dsq7b...
Conversely, if you want to run on a mainframe, consider porting to Linux.