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The replacement for a RISC workstation was an Intel one serving the same role for the same kind of customer. The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.
by wbl 6y ago
The replacement for a RISC workstation was an Intel one serving the same role for the same kind of customer. The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.
- zozbot234 6y ago> The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path. Datacenter-scale compute on non-proprietary platforms (e.g. leveraging OCP standards and best practices, which have been developed w/ significant input from FAANG and 'cloud' vendors) can easily tackle any mainframe workload. The implied path is obvious.
- monocasa 6y agoYes, and you can see the mainframe origins in the modern cloud. It was funny to see the predecessor to Kubernetes (Borg) had a language that was even a wink and a nod to JCL called BCL that then evolved into Kubernetes's resource config files. That being said, it takes a massive commitment and pretty much a rewrite from scratch to achieve a jump from mainframe to modern DC. You need to embrace individual node failure and that's not something you can just hack in.
- shrubble 6y agoCan you provide an example of a company that migrated their mainframe based highly-available transactions oriented workload, to what you mention?
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoThis is actually a good comment - look at a datacenter and squint, and tell me - is it not justa a new mainframe? AWS, Azure and GCP are all proprietary, and all are producing larger and larger servers and VMs. They are basically rentable, virtualised mainframes at this point
- rbanffy 6y agoAlso note Apple is transitioning their Unix workstation line back to RISC.
- zozbot234 6y agoYeah, RISC is good. RISC architecture is going to change everything! (according to Apple, ofc. /s)
- indigodaddy 6y agoWasn’t Nathan Myhrvold spouting this continuously at Microsoft in the 80’s that RISC was going to take over imminently? While that’s more likely presently than it ever was then, it still isn’t clear that it is even close to happening is it?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 6y agoThe only reason it failed is because there was little incentive to port software away from x86. Most of us didn't consider writing cross-platform software back then and the few who did were writing software for Unix, not Windows, and that because there wasn't a single dominant OS (Unix was a fuzzy target) and binary architecture you could write for, so you had to think about portability. Oddly enough, there was a lot of cross-platform work on games in the 80's because the home computer market was very fragmented.
- indigodaddy 6y agoThanks for this informative response!
- ChrisArchitect 6y agohaha, thanks Dade