We're very, very close to having 255 (or more) z CPUs. Here in Japan we have customers (plural) each running hundreds of IFLs. And that's only their IFLs. If they could stuff them all into one frame, they would. Someday I imagine they will.
Let's extrapolate. The z900 shipped at year end 2000. I don't quite remember day one exactly, but at least at some point the z900 could have up to 16 characterizable z CPUs per frame. By early 2008 you could buy a single System z10 EC with 64 characterizable z CPUs. That's a 4-fold increase in only 7-point-something years. (And that actually undercalls it. The z10 EC has more SAPs and spares. It's arguably more like a 5-fold increase, but let's just stick with 4-fold for this illustration.) If we merely assume that trend continues linearly, we would see a 256 PU machine in late 2015 or so, only a little over six years from now. In system engineering terms that's no time at all. Add a little error factor and it's still not very far away. My personal opinions only, of course. I have no particular inside knowledge on this. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
