I’ve just realised that I was confused. Steven, can your confirm that that bus 
width between the memory controller and CPU was 256 bytes (not bits)? On a G3 
9672?

> On 23 May 2023, at 8:48 am, David Crayford <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Good question. By bus size I'm assuming that your referring to cache-lines? I 
> wonder how much of a difference that makes with OOO pipelines? What I can 
> confirm is that my new Arm M2 MacBook Pro which has a 32-byte cache-line 
> sizes absolutely smashes my AMD Ryzen 5 in Cinebench benchmarks.
> 
> On 22/5/2023 8:26 pm, Steve Thompson wrote:
>> I have a question about these systems, both z and not z.
>> 
>> What is the current bus width supported?
>> 
>> At the G3 level for "z" the CPU-RAM bus was 256 bytes wide, as I recall.
>> 
>> For IOP to RAM it was 64 bytes wide.
>> 
>> For the systems I run (off the shelf stuff for Linux and windows) the bus is 
>> still at 64bits (8 bytes). Yes it has bus mastering, and pathing to allow 
>> certain adapter cards to use 8bit "channels"....
>> 
>> z/Arch POP has instructions for interrogating the bus sizes. I haven't had 
>> the time or opportunity to write any tests using this to find out what those 
>> bus sizes are it  would report on.
>> 
>> Steve Thompson
>> 
>> On 5/22/2023 7:52 AM, David Crayford wrote:
>>> On 22/5/2023 1:26 pm, Attila Fogarasi wrote:
>>>> Good point about NUMA....and it is still a differentiator and competitive
>>>> advantage for IBM z.
>>> 
>>> How is NUMA a competitive advantage for z? Superdomes use Intel UltraPath 
>>> Interconnect (UPI) links that can do glueless NUMA.
>>> 
>>>> IBM bought Sequent 20+ years ago to get their
>>>> excellent NUMA technology, and has since built some very clever cache
>>>> topology and management algorithms.  AMD has historically been crippled in
>>>> real-world performance due to cache inefficiencies.
>>> 
>>> What historical generation of AMD silicon was crippled? The EPYC supports 
>>> up to 384MB of L3 cache and the specs and benchmarks suggest the chiplet 
>>> architecture can easily handle the I/O.
>>> 
>>>> 10 years ago CICS was at 30 billion transactions per day, so
>>>> volume has tripled in 10 years, during the massive growth of cloud.
>>>> Healthy indeed.
>>> 
>>> I have a different perspective on what constitutes healthy. Here in 
>>> Australia, I've had the opportunity to meet architects from various banks 
>>> who are actively involved in or have completed the process of migrating the 
>>> read side of their CICS transactions to distributed systems. They have 
>>> embraced technologies like CDC and streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka 
>>> and distributed data stores such as Cassandra and MongoDb. This shift has 
>>> been primarily driven by disruptive technologies like mobile banking 
>>> pushing up mainframe software costs.
>>> 
>>> This is a common architectural pattern.
>>> 
>>> https://www.conferencecast.tv/talk-29844-nationwide-building-society-building-mobile-applications-and-a-speed-layer-with-mongodb#.talkPage-header
>>>  
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 2:56 PM David Crayford<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Sent again in plain text. Apple mail is too clever for it’s own good!
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 22 May 2023, at 12:46 pm, David Crayford<[email protected]>  wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On 21 May 2023, at 12:52 pm, Howard Rifkind<[email protected]>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hundreds of PC type servers still can’t handle the huge amount of data
>>>>> like a mainframe can.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> Of course, that's an absurd statement! By "PC type," I assume you're
>>>>> referring to x86? We can easily break this down. First things first, let's
>>>>> forget about the "hundreds" requirement. A 32 single socket system is
>>>>> enough to match up.
>>>>> 
>>>>> AMD EPYC is the poster child for single socket servers, running its novel
>>>>> chiplet technology on a 5nm process node. AMD's infinity interconnects are
>>>>> capable of massive I/O bandwidth. You can learn more about it here:
>>>>> https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-architecture. Each socket
>>>>> can have a maximum of 96 cores, but even if we use a conservative 64 cores
>>>>> per socket, that's a scale-out of 2048 cores. AMD also has accelerators 
>>>>> for
>>>>> offload encryption/compression, etc.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Over in Intel land, the Ice Lake server platform is not quite as
>>>>> impressive, but the QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) yet again handles huge
>>>>> bandwidth. Intel also has accelerators such as their QAT, which can either
>>>>> be on-die SoC or a PCIe card. It's not too dissimilar to zEDC but with the
>>>>> advantage that it supports all popular compression formats and not just
>>>>> DEFLATE. You can find more information here:
>>>>> https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-quick-assist-technology-overview.html
>>>>>  
>>>>> .
>>>>> 
>>>>> A more apples-to-apples comparison would be the HP Superdome Flex, which
>>>>> is a large shared memory system lashed together with NUMA interconnects,
>>>>> with a whopping 32 sockets and a maximum core count of 896 on a single
>>>>> vertically integrated system. HP Enterprise has technology such as nPars,
>>>>> which is similar to PR/SM. They claim 99.999% availability on a single
>>>>> system and even beyond when clustered.
>>>>> 
>>>>> On the Arm side, it gets even more interesting as the hyperscalers and
>>>>> cloud builders are building their own kit. Although this technology is
>>>>> almost certainly the growth area of non-x86 workloads, you can find more
>>>>> details about it here:
>>>>> https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/18/ampere-gets-out-in-front-of-x86-with-192-core-siryn-ampereone/
>>>>>  
>>>>> .
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
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