Mike Ward writes: >This is one area where I really have a problem. It used to be >back in the 370 days that if a machine was rated at 50 mips and >you moved up to 100 mips you really noticed the difference in >execution time.... I know I'm on a rant....
Was there even a 100 MIPS uniprocessor model in the 370 days? I don't know, but I know that less than 12 years ago the uniprocessor z900 was a bit under 200 MIPS, and that was considered a fast machine. (And hasn't it been a fantastic decade for mainframe core performance!) There's tremendous flexibility in capacity configurations nowadays -- much more than in the past. If you want fewer, "taller" engines, that's available. Or the opposite. Or several somethings in between, in general. You can choose whatever works best. That said, with 80-way single machines available, the multiprocessor bridge is now well crossed. :-) I recommend taking steps to tweak and to improve workloads so that they aren't unduly burdened by the limits of single core performance. Goodness knows IBM has done a lot of work in that area. CICS Transaction Server is an excellent example among many. There are limits in improvements and tweaks, of course. But better is still better. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
