"Carroll, Barry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > IBM's mainframes are now constructed out of massively pararallel > arrays > of MPUs. In other words, all that number crunching is done by > hundreds > or thousands of souped up PCs, all connected together and stuffed > into a > single box.
The processors may be the same, the architecture is significantly different. Data, memory and programs all have their own busses etc for one thing and there are multiple IO channels for disk along with multiple DMA controllers and in some cases dedicated ALUs and FPUs alongside those built into the chips. All of which keep the data sliding along smoothly. These are all part of the reason that mainframes often look slow on paper - often with 1GHz CPUs etc - but the architecture around them more than compensates for the data processing they are designed for. I find it interesting that in our company we have been able to gradually replace (over a 15 year period) a suite of 30 mainframes with 3. And we only really use 3 for resilience/backup reasons! Alan G. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
