I replied to this directly to the newsgroup yesterday when email delivery was interrupted. I know some don't read the newsgroup, so I just want to reply again with the pertinent data in case anyone is interested. I hope I am not breaching ettiquette by doing this - but if so, I apologize in advance.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Edward Jaffe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 4:31 PM Subject: Re: PSI MIPS (was: Links to decent 'why the mainframe thrives' article) > > In any case, raw MIPS improvements are easily researched. For example, > the charts at http://www.tech-news.com/publib/ show the largest zSeries > processor in 2000, made available in 1Q00, was a 2064-116, capable of > delivering 2694 MIPS; the largest System z processor today, made > available in 4Q05, was a 2094-754, capable of delivering 17,802 MIPS. > That's a 6.6:1 improvement in less than five years. (Not bad!) That isn't per-CPU MIPS, though (which is what was originally being discussed). IOW, there was a discussion about how PSI claimed 350MIPS for an 8-core Itanium vs. 585 MIPS for a single CPU z9, with the comment that it took 8 cores to get half of what a single z9 could do. In any case, I see that the 2064-1C1 (single processor) achieved about 250 MIPS, while a 2094-701 achieved about 608 (single OS image) MIPS. So in reality, the *processor* improvement was about 2.5x - still OK, but not quite as impressive. Which brings me back to the point about 'keeping pace' with processor improvements of other architectures. x86 had about an 8-fold performance increase during the same period (I'm not talking clock rates). For whatever that is worth. And, I am aware that the system performance is more important than processor peformance for end users- however, I'm just trying to keep the focus on the question of why people think mainframe processors are slow compared to others. Regards, Dean > > -- > Edward E Jaffe > Phoenix Software International, Inc > 5200 W Century Blvd, Suite 800 > Los Angeles, CA 90045 > 310-338-0400 x318 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO > Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
