Posts by mcguire 2 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2009
The article states that "32-bit x86, 64-bit x64, and Itanium processors", when in fact it is not limited to those architectures at all. I am personally running it on PowerPC and UltraSPARC architectures, and will be building it on ARM9 later this week. It is reasonably portable code.
Just FYI.
Actually (referencing Kebabbert's comment), it's not likely that a Nehalem can come anywhere near the performance of a modern mainframe. People have been predicting the death of mainframes for thirty years, and they're still what keep the world turning.
Perhaps some information on the systems-level architecture would be illuminating.
An IBM z10 can be configured with sixteen quad-core processors clocked at 4.4GHz, with 3MB of L2 cache per core and 24MB of four-core-shared L3 cache. These processors have four 13GBps memory ports, two 48GBps SMP hub ports, and two 17GBps I/O ports. There are often as many ancillary processors (for handling I/O, accelerating Java, etc) processors as "regular" processors in such a system, depending on the configuration.
Another important aspect of mainframe design is reliability. There's a great deal of internal redundancy in these machines...you can walk up and put a bullet into one of these racks and, chances are, you'll never know it unless you go look at the OS error log.
This is not PC hardware; there are reasons they cost millions. Be glad your bank transactions won't be handled by Nehalem machines.
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