IBM Z Telum Mainframe Processor at Hot Chips 33 | Hacker News Reader

IBM Z Telum Mainframe Processor at Hot Chips 33

servethehome.com

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The Z processors are really interesting in my opinion.

I finally got around to running some benchmarks for the compression accelerator yesterday and the results are were pretty incredible resulting in up to 20 speedup for decompression and up to 200 times for compression. It would be very interesting if other chip manufacturers began incorporating accelerators for operations like that.

What a mighty impressive beast.

But yeah. We say that for every Z CPU. This one is no different.

The Z series.CPUs are quite fascinating in the design sense, and the overall reliability engineering of mainframes is fascinating.

The article (post?) itself has what seem to be incomplete sentences, as if ML-written.

Example: ```New error correction and sparing where even an entire L2 cache array has an issue to drive beyond 99.99999% availability (seven 9s.)```

Something "having an issue" is usually indicative of a problem. Did they mean "despite an entire L2 cache array having an issue, the CPU can still drive beyond..."?

Or:

```This core uses SMT2 and can run after.```

Ummm. After what? Where?

From the first paragraph:

"This is being done live, so please excuse typos."

I'm not sure that I understand myself. I'm just guessing that this article was written at a convention or presentation in a 'live-tweeting' like context. Sort of like war-time reporters in decades past phoning in stories to their editors.

IBM are you here? Are you listening? Make the mainframe hobbyist friendly.

(How else will you train new evangelists? How else will you get more operators from younger generations?)

It could be really fun to have a desktop pc with a mainframe processor like that, though that is unlikely to happen. For now you can sign up at https://linuxone.cloud.marist.edu for access to a 2 vCPU LinuxONE vps running on one which is pretty cool

Wondering about the same with POWER 10 too. I got bored with consumer tech for a long time and really want to look at all these exotic niche tech. It is interesting both of them happens to come from IBM. So while I think their software sucks, their Hardware team seems to be operating on a different dimension.

With POWER you at least have something like https://www.raptorcs.com/ Though I don't think they will be using POWER10, at least not this year anyways.

https://twitter.com/raptorcompsys/status/1295364416469377026...

I don't fully agree with the sentiment that it would be IBM's responsibility to cater to hobbyists (nor do I think that programming in, say, COBOL or PL/1 is actually fun), but if you must try on a limited budget, there is the Hercules emulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)

There is also moshix' youtube channel covering the topic.

I am not on a limited budget. I spend tens of thousands of dollars to learn. But will not invest millions for a mainframe.

What is frustrating is that IBM has a System Z emulation environment for developers called zPDT. It costs $7K/yr and is only available to registered ISVs. Really wish they would drop that cost and make it available to anyone.

Some of the customers are banks. But does anybody know of banks that has migrated to x86 servers or similar?

In ~2014 - 2016 when Cloud and AWS were hyped as X most banks or finance companies were starting to think of moving from mainframe into "modern" infrastructure with x86 and linux. Those studies took a little more than a year and by 2018 I dont think anyone actually moved. ( And I am glad they didn't )

As of 2021, the total unit of Mainframe in use is still increasing at steady pace.

Banks (and not only) employ multitude of technologies, all over the place.

Personally I encountered mentions of core bank software (as in, the actual account holding code) being available from one vendor in z/OS and OpenVMS versions, some places I know of use DB2 on z/OS for various data, a certain big international powerhouse of a bank has probably everything from IBM z/OS to several cloud offerings.

There are also banks that run "pretty modern"... and frankly speaking, that one case I know was the most shitty code - and it still had COBOL, except now with added Oracle in the mix on top of horrible mess of RHEL.

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