The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <l...@garlic.com> writes: > has anybody gotten hands on intel 6core gulftown with two threads per > core? ... there is reference that some chips might be sold with only > four cores enabled (lower price?). > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulftown_%28microprocessor%29 > > what is the chance of beating 1000MIPS?? re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#68 Entry point for a Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#70 Entry point for a Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#71 Entry point for a Mainframe? possibly $5/370-mip??? vendors have been sorting chips ... chips failing higher speed test, being classed at lower rate for lower price. however, there seems to be some additional sorting ... apparently oriented towards overclocking & gaming marketing ... that pushes higher rates ... and are sold at premium price. brand names are starting to offer boxes with such chips ... when it use to be just niche, offbrand players. some of the reduced core chips aren't necessarily just pricing ... sometimes it may be chip defects that would ordinarily have the whole chip going to trashbin ... localized defects may be core specific ... rest of the chip still being useable. other recent chip/foundary posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#62 z9 / z10 instruction speed(s) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#66 z9 / z10 instruction speed(s) late 70s & early 80s, single chip processors were starting to appear that drastically reduced cost of building computer systems ... and saw lots of vendors starting to move into the market. However, the cost of producing proprietary operating system hadn't come done ... so overall costs weren't reduced that much and therefor the price that the system could be offered to customers wouldn't come down. I've frequently commented those economics significantly contributed to the move to unix offerings ... vendors could ship unix on their platform for enormously lower cost (similar to the cost reduction offered by single chip processors) compared to every vendor doing their own proprietary operating system from scratch. A similar argument was used in the IBM/ATT effort moving higher level pieces of UNIX to stippred down TSS/370 base (the cost of adding mainframe ras, erep, device support, etc ... being several times larger than plain unix port). reference in this recent post mentioning adtech conference i did (that including presentations on both the unix/ssup activity as well as running cms applications on mvs): http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#17 Senior Java Developer vs. MVS Systems Programmer (warning: Conley rant) conference was also somewhat the origins for the VM/XB (ZM) effort (also mentioned in the above). the effort was then declared strategic, hundreds of people writting specs, and then collapsed under its own weight (somewhat a mini-FS). The strategic scenario was doing microkernel (somewhat akin to tss/370 ssup effort for ATT/unix) that had (at least) all the mainframe ras, erep and device support ... that could be used as common base for all the company's operating system offerings (the costs to the company in this area was essentially fully replicated for every operating system offering). in later 80s, having aix/370 (project that ported UCLA's Locus unix-clone to both 370 & 386) run under vm370 was aix/370 being able to rely on vm370 RAS (cost of adding that RAS directly to aix/370 was many times larger than the simple port of locus to 370). In recent years, increasing amounts of RAS is moving into intelligent hardware ... somewhat mitigating the duplication of effort in the operating systems. -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
