9 ms·
IBM doubles its 14nm EDRAM density, adds hundreds of megabytes of cache
- smartstakestime 7y agoThis is my type of tech. Not glamorous but highly functional.
- magicalhippo 7y agoImpressive tech. How big is the market for these machines these days? Like how many Z15 CPs would they expect to sell (assuming each Z15 install can vary a lot in size).
- microtherion 7y agoI suppose there is a world market for maybe five of those…
- pm90 7y agoThis is likely catering specifically to IBM's customers who have been them from the mainframe days and continue to rely on IBM products (airline, banking etc.). The systems used by these orgs are massive in complexity and I'm not sure how much they want to invest in refactoring them to run on COTS hardware.... it probably doesn't make sense for them financially.
- nabla9 7y agoThere is market for reliability, security and scale in compact size, so they can get new customers. Companies like Robinhood may discover that it's actually cheaper to by reliable and secure hardware and write software into it than try to write fault tolerant and secure software over COTS hardware.
- tinco 7y agoIs it really that easy to write reliable software for mainframes? What sort of abstraction do you get from them that you don't get in commodity hardware? Nice easy shot at Robinhood of course, but they're a very young company. Do the big banks really have a fundamental edge that's not just more invested hours?
- msandford 7y agoI think the idea is that your locks and threads are so close latency wise that you only need a few to get the job done. Versus trying to figure out how to parallelize things, some of which are inherently non-parallelizable. But sometimes you don't know until you try! Ain't life grand?
- dfox 7y agoIBM started to market what is essentially z with only IFL CPs as kind of k8s in a box so they obviously try to expand into lower tier markets.
- ksec 7y agoSame question, and I wonder why much do they cost too.
- baybal2 7y agoI wonder if it will ever see a chance to go mainstream. The memory bottleneck is pretty much the only thing in CPU design that didn't see a dramatic improvement over the years. Its elimination is the only obvious improvement pathway still left with expectation of double digit performance gains. So we need either very big and very fast caches, or extremely wide and low latency memory. Both options are quite costly. Adding on die DRAM that can work at least as fast as 500mhz will surely require some specialty process with a lot of compromises like the one in the article. Gluing something like HBM2 to the die for a second option moves the cost from the specialty process to the specialty packaging. Not much better.
- jiggawatts 7y ago> Gluing something like HBM2 to the die for a second This is something AMD is already doing for EPYC, and they've already used HBM2 in their GPUs. So I'm surprised they haven't released any CPU models with crazy huge L4 caches using a few GB of HBM2. Then again, Intel made a laptop CPU with a huge 128MB cache and their comment was that it didn't make that big of a difference. I believe the performance boost was less than 5% for going from 64MB to 128MB.
- vvanders 7y agoRead access patterns matter more than cache sizes, triple digit improvements are possible of you have linear reads.
- toohotatopic 7y agoHasn't Intel bought the company that was on the brink of producing those CPU-memory combos? Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the name of the company or an article about it.
- deepnotderp 7y agoYou mean UpMem or Venray Technology?
- RantyDave 7y agoTwelve point two billion transistors. That's absolutely nuts. Does anyone have a ballpark figure for how much a 'drawer' of four of these things costs? What's it supposed to run, is this an Oracle/DB2 beast?
- tibbetts 7y agoThere is a version of DB2 for mainframe, but it’s a totally different codebase as I understand it. The operating system on a mainframe provides a lot of what modern app developers get from their database and caching systems, generally with better fault tolerance and availability. So if you have an app built for mainframe, it often will not have an external database dependency. Doing transactions can just look like writing to memory or files.
- rodgerd 7y agoWhen I was running Z for Linux the costing was in the order of six figures per processor.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 7y agoThe cost will decrease over time, just like all tech.
- unixhero 7y agoHighly dense Docker hypervisor hypervisor hypervisor.
- RantyDave 7y agoNobody's even mentioned Crysis.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago> is this an Oracle/DB2 beast? My impression is that RDBMS workloads are generally far more IO-intensive than CPU-intensive. Looking at my own Azure SQL CPU vs IO vs Log charts right now, even with some CPU-heavy OLAP queries barely passes 25% CPU in the 2 vCore-sized database used in my current main project.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- insulanian 7y agoAre there any modern initiatives around mainframe? What is IBM doing to promote it more to new generations? Are there any startups doing anything related to the mainframe? I was always fascinated by the tech around mainframe and am even thinking about moving into that space. I can imagine that a barrier to entry is high... or?
- yingw787 7y agoMainframes are interesting to me (but I think a lot of things are interesting) :) I found this one site with links to books on mainframes: http://www.mainframes.com/Books.html http://www.mainframes.com/Books.html If IBM is investing in 14nm tech for mainframes, it's not dead tech. A quick search revealed the following: """ 70% of the world's production data, and 55% of world's enterprise transactions, took place on mainframes (2016) """ http://ibmmainframes.com/wiki/who-uses-mainframes.html http://ibmmainframes.com/wiki/who-uses-mainframes.html
- kanzenryu2 7y agoThe barrier is not always high https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk
- insulanian 7y agoAre you trying to say that it is wide and heavy as well :) Joke aside, how are people actually getting started in this space? And more importantly, is it "worth it" financially? Is the mainframe skill shortage ("dreaded COBOL"?) a real thing?
- waterheater 7y ago> How are people actually getting started in this space? Depends on your needs. Do you need near-perfect uptime? Most don't; their products aren't so critical, so they settle for a cheaper option. Do want to run a data center? Most don't; it's so much easier to push code to AWS and let them handle the infrastructure demands. Startups historically survive because of adaptation and speed. The mainframe may not fit those operational principles, though that's up to a given startup (see below for industries which might benefit the most from a mainframe). > Is it "worth it" financially? The System Z series excels at transactions and updating records. Industries which deal extensively with these types of computations are banks, airlines, credit card companies, stock brokers, insurance companies, and certainly others. If you're in one of those lines of business, you probably should look into mainframes. More generally, if you need to maintain system state at all costs, mainframes are probably a good option. I would not recommend mainframes for heavy, laborous computing loads (scientific computing, rendering boxes, etc.) > Is the mainframe skill shortage ("dreaded COBOL"?) a real thing? If a company wants to add a new feature to or fix a bug in a 40 year-old COBOL program, they'll likely have a hard time finding a young programmer, sure. Some older COBOL coders are helping fill the game while they can. Don't forget that the System Z mainframes have a level of backwards compatibility that makes x86 blush; your COBOL program will certainly still run. I wager most new programs (<15 years) have been written with Java or C++, given z/OS supports more languages than COBOL: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/zosbasics/com.ibm.zos.zappldev/zappldev_22.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/zosbasics/com.ib... COBOL is dying, as it would be ridiculous to start a new project in COBOL. But many legacy systems still work, so why change them if they aren't broke? I've made a comment in the past about IBM mainframes which you also might find informative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20978305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20978305