3 ms·
> I don't mean this in a condescending way at all, but really out of sheer curiosity: Who uses mainframes nowadays and what for? There's probably some minor st
by sho_hn 2y ago
> I don't mean this in a condescending way at all, but really out of sheer curiosity: Who uses mainframes nowadays and what for?
There's probably some minor strategic relevance here. E.g. for the government which has some workloads (research labs, etc.) that suit these systems, it's probably a decent idea not to try and migrate over to differently-shaped compute just to keep this CPU IP and its dev teams alive at IBM, to make sure that the US stays capable of whipping up high-performance CPU core designs even if Intel/AMD/Apple falter.
- dralley 2y agoThose customers don't use mainframe, they use POWER. There's been a handful of POWER supercomputers in the past decade built for essentially that reason.
- rbanffy 2y agoPOWER is not uncommon in HPC, but IBMi (which is very enterprisey) is also based on POWER. You won't find IBM mainframes in HPC, but that's because HPC is not as sensitive for latency and reliably than online transaction processing, and, with mainframes, you are paying for that, not for TFLOPS.
- zifpanachr23 2y agoYeah the architectures focus on different things. The huge caches on the z series chips are designed primarily around the kind of latency sensitive workloads more common in finance than the massive floating point throughput often needed for big scientific computing.