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: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).