Although the mainframe is acknowledged as the undisputed "800 pound gorilla" of traditional data processing, it has not been perceived as able to challenge RISC cheetahs in a race. But with the speed boost of the z10, IBM is training its heavyweight to chase after new workloads.
With great fanfare, on Tuesday IBM unveiled its latest mainframe – the z10 EC. And, for the first time in many, many years, the mainframers actually showcased technology, instead of their typical approach to avoid such discussion. This time around, System z and System p engineers jointly designed circuitry used in both the POWER6 and the z10 processor. Certainly the mainframe design retains its unique, admittedly complex, instruction set and is not built on top of RISC instructions. However, basic functions such as arithmetic units, cache, memory control, etc. use common implementations in both POWER6 and z10. Leveraging the fast clock rate design point of POWER6, IBM highlights that the quad-core z10 chip runs at 4.4 GHz, more than 2.5 times faster than the 1.7 GHz of the z9 predecessor. Of course, to achieve such clock rates, less “work” is accomplished per clock cycle. The result is that z10 processors offer about a 50% performance boost over z9. Nonetheless, operating at 4.4 GHz allows IBM to describe the z10 as state-of-the-art to reassure customers who held a perception that mainframes could not keep up with the performance of other more “modern” designs.
Let’s be clear, z10 is not going to out-perform UNIX systems on the computational and transactional workloads, and benchmarks, where RISC designs excel. Mainframes were created for “data processing” and still shine for real-world applications that access vast amounts of data and value extensive I/O bandwidth as much as computational prowess. Of course, when it comes to reliability and security, the mainframe is unmatched. But, such “traditional” computing is only growing slowly, often growing slower than the technology advances commonly identified as following Moore’s Law growth rates.
So, IBM has a major focus on attracting “today’s” workloads to the mainframe. IBM promotes its specialty engines as cost effective solutions to consolidate Linux and Java workloads. Naturally it would be expected that a vendor will select its best customer stories to present to its customers and analysts. Nonetheless, the customer testimonials were impressive, especially from Nationwide. Dissecting the customer stories to understand superior aspects of the mainframe (hardware and operating environments such as zVM) takes detailed examination that can’t be accomplished quickly. We hope to probe further to understand just where mainframes are the best choice.
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