[email protected] (Paul Gilmartin) writes: > "... is killing traditional ..." is a paraphrase of "progress". In the 1950s > you might have heard "The electronic computer is killing traditional > punched card tabulators." Or in the 1960s "The transistor is killing > traditional vacuum tube computers." > > This is unpleasant only to those overly invested in the obsolescent > technologies. And not all such technological prognostications become > reality. Magnetic bubbles. Cryogenic computers. Quantum computers.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013g.html#5 SAS Deserting the MF? part of the issue is that the x86 server chip makers are saying they ship more x86 server chips to cloud operators than they are shipping to the brand name server vendors ... and those cloud volumes aren't included in the x86 server market numbers (aka cloud x86 servers are larger than the total of brand name x86 server "market"). another part of the issue is that the cloud operators for a decade or so have been claiming they build their own servers for 1/3rd the price of the same servers from brand name x86 server vendors (contributed to huge downward pressure on profit margins in the rest of the market). There is even rumor that some of the brand name vendors have gotten into this extremely low margin business ... assembling x86 components for cloud operations. when something becomes larger than what is thought to be the major market ... then it may be time to pay some attention. ibm has $1815 base price for e5-2600 blade (a common x86 server found at cloud operator). it is two 8-core chips for 16 processors and benchmark of 527BIPS or $3.44/BIPS (compared to 80processor z196 at 50BIPS @$28M or $560,000/BIPS); cloud vendors claims of assembling servers at 1/3rd the price of brand name vendors would possibly bring it close to $1/BIPS. e5-2600v2 with new chip technology due out this year is predicted to be twice the performance and 12cores/chip ... bringing e5-2600 blade to over 1TIPS. There is also references to e5-4600 blade in same form factor with four chips ... which could be well over 2TIPS. aggregate mainframe sales for the past several years (before the latest decline) has been approx. equivalent to 180 80-processor z196 and @50BIPS comes out to be about 9TIPS/year ... which is less than half a rack of e5-2600 blades. big cloud operators are building new megadatacenters with hundreds of thousands of such blades (and millions of processors). last year financials had mainframe processors 4% of revenue but total mainframe business (with software, services, etc) was 25% of revenue (and 40% of profit). that has mainframe customers paying ibm avg. of 6.25 times their processor purchase for mainframe operations ... i.e. TCO just to IBM for $28M 80processor, 50BIP z196 then averages total of $175M or $3.5M/BIPS (compared to possibly $1/BIPS at cloud operations, a factor of 3,500,000 times difference). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
