3 ms·

Modern cloud environments are basically virtualised infinitely scalable mainframes.

• yencabulator 2y ago
  Modern cloud environments tend to be aimed at running multiple independent workloads well on a huge server. Mainframes are generally aimed at running a smaller number of large workloads well on a huge server. Sort of analogous to multithreaded vs singlethreaded performance in CPU benchmarks. My personal take: The typical x86[1] is a sports car. Gets going fast, reaches most destinations fast, not great for driving for several hours, and not great at moving lots of cargo. A mainframe is a freight train. Somewhat slow to get going, but can haul large amounts of cargo without breaks for a long time. Mainframes weren't built for an interactive, highly variable, query-response workload; they were built for the classic overnight/monthly batch job that streams through a large amount of data. [1]: It's not about the CPU, it's about the architecture around it, like this article talks about cache, expanded to I/O etc concerns.
  • MobiusHorizons 2y ago
    That’s how I had always thought about mainframes before, but the focus on low latency here seems to suggest a different purpose (more sports car like than any x86 server cpu) is this a different kind of mainframe?
    • yencabulator 2y ago
      The freight train part of my thinking is admittedly dated . This is an impressively fast design, but you'll get much more x86 for the same money -> x86 wins when you can scale out.