IBM Leaks Details on New Mainframe

Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"

Comments

Re:54 way chips?

[cruff]

Nah, just a bunch of dual core chips. Take a look at the IBM Journal of Research and Development which has a lot of nice detail. Look at Vol. 48, No. 3/4 and Vol. 51, No. 1/2.

Re:This might be a dumb question...

[TheThiefMaster]

It's probably for the same reason we talk about thousands of kilograms instead of "just" saying "gigagrams". The term "MIPS" is not really an abbreviation anymore, it became a proper word describing a performance unit everyone in the industry is used to. Actually "thousands of kilograms" would be "megagrams", but we generally call them "tonnes".

Re:Low-End Port to PowerPC?

[TheRaven64]

The z6 isn't very similar to the POWER6. In the most important aspect with respect to porting software, namely the instruction set, they are completely different. The z6 instruction set is an incremental improvement on an architecture that goes back all the way to the 1960s with System/360 - the longest running architecture to maintain backwards compatibility. The POWER6 architecture is an incremental improvement on an architecture which dates back to the mid '90s and was designed from scratch around a completely different set of ideas.

The things they share are not visible to the user as they are hidden behind the instruction decoder. You can see some evidence of the fact that IBM are trying to lower costs by sharing a lot of the design between the two lines though from certain new additions to the POWER instruction set, such as hardware support for Binary Coded Decimals (useful in high-throughput financial systems and present in the mainframe line since the 1401 and 700-series, which preceded System/360).

Re:Kinda slow, eh?

[palegray.net]

Considering a single modern quad core Pentium has about twice the processing power as this mainframe. You are kidding, right? These systems are massively parallel machines, and are frequently used these days to present dozens of operating system images running concurrently. They support nifty ideas like instant failover and clustering on one machine, with arbitrary SMP to scale up performance as necessary.

Re:Kinda slow, eh?

[TheRaven64]

Considering a single modern quad core Pentium has about twice the processing power as this mainframe Uh, what? Currently, the fastest CPU you can buy is the POWER6. This mainframe uses the the z6 CPU, which is effectively a POWER6 with a different instruction decoder and MMU, and it supports up to 64 of them. They are connected via an SMP hub chip which adds 24MB of shared level 3 cache.

They also support partitioning on the hardware level, so you can run z/OS or Linux virtual machines with almost no overhead (something you've been able to do since it was called System/370). You also have a huge amount more fault tolerance with a system like this (take a look at how many transistors on the CPUs are dedicated to error checking, and then start looking at the peripheral systems).

Re:Kinda slow, eh?

[dreamchaser]

You don't get out much do you? Mainframes are going strong in data centers that need high availability, fault tolerant, error correcting, massively parallel systems. There is also a LOT of old code that is still going strong on them. Their inherent ability to run multiple virtualized OSes is another strong suit.

Your math is also way off if you think 4 x86 cores outperform this. I'll leave you to do the proper calculations as your homework.

Re:Kinda slow, eh?

[Marnhinn]

I work currently in an organization that uses mainframes. They are the z9 series - and honestly are some of the most useful things.

We use them due to ability operate in something called a sysplex. A sysplex is when multiple mainframes share data (known as DASD) and work together. When a mainframe is in a sysplex, you can do all sorts of things to the machine without having to bring your application down. These range from whole operating system upgrades to hardware maintenance and the end user will never see the impact. A sysplex literally is designed to be a 24x7 operation.

You can buy other types of machines that will be more powerful, faster or do operation x better, but it is hard to find a set of machines that are as stable and reliable as a mainframe is (and process millions of transactions per second).

Also, in terms of virtualization - a single mainframe on z/Linux can host many virtual linux servers - enough that you can save a substantial amount on power costs (my org estimated 400k a year in savings in terms of power alone - if the linux servers that are hosted individually on one of our distributed networks went to virtual on a mainframe).

Re:Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you know what thought did. Linux is a 1st class OS on Z series hardware. Expect IBM to support it on this machine.

Translation

[mother_reincarnated]

an ABEND is an 'abnormal end' Which is mainframespeak for when something dies :)

Re:Kinda slow, eh?

[kmankmankman2001]

Mainframes could share DASD *long* before the introduction of sysplex. Now - *parallel* sysplex, that's different - that's shared memory for things like DB2 lock structures, etc.

I'm a mainframer from way back and I've got the grey hair to prove it. :)