z10: greener, better, faster, stronger
Alright, I've finally managed to write a little entry about this...
On February 26th, IBM announced a new series of mainframes: the z10. It's still z/Architecture, although they expanded it a bit.
Here's what it looks like (image shamelessly stolen from the internet):
So, what makes it better, you ask?
It's faster (up to 64x quad-core 4.4GHz processors), it supports 3 times as much memory (storage in mainframe speak) as the z9 did (512GB -> 1.5TB), the cores are 50-100% faster depending on the load, and other goodies....I'll just list them in a list...it's more parsable that way:
- 64x quad-core 4.4GHz processors
- 64 kB L1 i-cache
- 128 kB L1 d-cache
- 3 MB L2 cache
- z/Architecture
- crypto, decimal floating point, and compression accelerators
- 894 instructions, 75% implemented in hardware
- 1MB, as well as 4 kB page tables (z9 has only 4 kB)
- 1.5TB memory (z9 had 512GB limit)
- 50-100% faster execution (depending on the workload)
- One z10 is equivalent to 1500 x86 servers, but uses 85% less power
- Available in the second quarter of 2008
IBM also announced that there's a porting effort to get OpenSolaris to run on the z10.