Its worse because as I read it the base system isn't the config they are actually comparing. So based on personal experience with low end z/series machines in t

Its worse because as I read it the base system isn't the config they are actually comparing. So based on personal experience with low end z/series machines in the past, basically the base price quoted ends up doubling by the time disk/software/etc all get added. Then what you have is a machine which is intended for DR situations, so the CPU "capacity" is limited to the point where its enough to boot the machine and little else. Then in order to match the named perf, what happens is that you cycle to a higher capacity tier (for $$$$$$$ of course). These marketing materials basically need an IBM decoder ring, and its on purpose because if they just published the TPC-C/$ numbers everyone would be able to compare the machine vs the competition, and it likely wouldn't look good. So the benchmarks are contrived the same way apple was contriving altivec/photoshop benchmarks in the early 2000's. Sure with this one benchmark the machine is 10x faster than the competition but for these other 99 benchmarks its 1/2 the speed kinds of thing. I'm sure buried in the IBM license there remains a restriction on publishing benchmarks. Which maybe at some point I will post my own personal results running on an older machine when I don't think IBM would be able to trace me... but that said, lets say, in the past these numbers were cooked in such a way that the absolute top of the line machines were roughly equivilant to a mid-range x86 server available for about $40k. Now that said, if you can use all 40TB of redundant ram, and your workload needs 100 PCIe slots that it can only drive at about 1/100th of the total bandwidth (aka you need them for connectivity with the ability to burst at line rate) then sure, the zseries can come out ahead. But frankly your probably doing it wrong if you plug in 20 100Gbit adapters that average 10Gbit each. I'm guessing a large part of the posted efficiency of these machines comes from the ML accelerator they now have, which gives them the ability to optimize some ML+DB type of workload that requires a big fat nvidia GPU under normal circumstances but doesn't make good use of it (or they are just comparing it to a x86 without a GPU...).