Don't be so hard on the mainframes. They're absolutely fantastic and they're one main job in life, executing transactions. And you can run the same binary, un

Don't be so hard on the mainframes. They're absolutely fantastic and they're one main job in life, executing transactions. And you can run the same binary, unmodified, from the original 1960's system 360 on today's Z series. That's what business love. Don't lose my money and don't make me re-write it. And while some Z series are running Linux, they're really there to run Z/OS, CICS, and those transaction workloads. You could move those workloads to Linux but you'd have to recompile them, but also re-create the entire DB2, CICS, VSAM, MQ infra on Linux. That's a great way to light piles of money on fire. And re-writing those programs in other languages can work, but is often a great way to light much larger piles of money on fire. And mainframes do have cool tricks up their sleeves like LPARS, and Sysplexes, and so on. But your comment wasn't really about the beauty that is the modern mainframe. But yes, the original 8086 was meant to look not unfamiliar to mainframe assembly (at some level). I actually think they're talking about packing general compute cores into a super computer that would be better off having RTL specific to the task. Like AVX 512 (which Intel seems to be moving away from while AMD is embracing?). But that's kind of an early 2000's view of super computers. They have been packing accelerators on them (notably graphics cards) to crank up the teraflops. Whether or not those were effectively exploited, or they actually got the performance, I don't know. In my work I've seen fewer customers head that way, but that's not the pool I swim in. Some machines added FPGAs to the mix. We use them on our custom network cards so we do more of the packet processing outside the kernel. But maybe the weather super-computer should have some RTL for Navier - Stokes (?) that's what I think the weather people use? Or maybe make a custom silicon just for super-computing with a whole bunch of AVX512 units? Or maybe a lot more on-chip separate instruction cache? Might not be useful for CoD or Java but awesome for SC. But I do agree with you their characterization of modern super computers is a little dated.