No not how many instructions your wife gives you every day.

Quote::

SAN FRANCISCO—IBM Corp. said Wednesday (Sept. 1) that it will begin shipping Sept. 10 a new mainframe computer computer capable of 50 billion instructions per second, powered by 96 microprocessors with clock speeds up to 5.2 gigahertz. IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) said the z196 processor is a four-core chip that contains 1.4 billion transistors on a 512-square millimeter surface. The chip was designed by IBM engineers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and was manufactured using IBM's 45-nm silicon-on-insulator process at the company's 300-mm fab in East Fishkill, N.Y., IBM said. The mainframe processor makes use of IBM's embedded DRAM technology, which allows IBM to place dense DRAM caches, or components, on the same chips as high-speed microprocessors, resulting in improved performance, according to the company. A spokesperson for IBM said the company was not disclosing any other z196 benchmark data at this time. The new mainframe, the zEnterprise System, is the most powerful commercial IBM system ever, according to the company, capable of executing roughly 17,000 times more instructions per second than the most advanced system available in 1970, according to the company.

Now that is a fast computer.

Edit to make a comparison.

Each Processor in the new IBM system does about 521,000 million instructions per second, or 130,000 million instructions per core per second. Shocked

The Brand new Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE, manages in its 6 cores to squeeze out 148,000 million instructions per second, just above the single core of the z196.

So a 96 processor system would be 50,016,000 million instructions per second. Or 50 trillion instructions per second. It would take 338 of Intels newest processors to do the same amount of computation, assuming they can be as efficient as the IBM with its huge memory caches.

Dimitri

Dimitri wrote:

No not how many instructions your wife gives you every day. Dimitri

Well, you don't know my wife..

Seriously, hell yeah.. thats a FAST computer.
I program microcontroller for a living and I am still working with 8 bits controller running from 32kHz to a maximum of staggering 40MHz..
That make me feel small..

Maybe I should buy a new gun to lift my spirit up..

What family of microcontrollers do you use?

I have mainly used Atmel's AVR line myself.

Dimitri

I mainly use Microchip.
AVR are great, but Microchip have large arrays to choose from at this moment.
Plus, since I am a gold level Design Partner with Microchip,
Microchip give me some money (royalty or loyalty?) for every design that made it to production.

Not bad for additional fund to buy more powder, primers etc..

That is not too shabby. I not only do not get paid for what I do, no one ever knows about it as it stays on my workbench at home.

Dimitri

WOW....I can't even understand all of that stuff 'Mitri, let along comprehend it.

I am assuming from the conversation between yourself and Gelan that this is one mean SOB computer.

I wonder if IBM will do the same with this as they have in the past...only have OEM peripherals able to connect.

Oh yeah...and Gelan is right mate...you don't know my missus either.

Cheers, Vince

To be fair, the computer revolution and the "IBM PC" now just the "PC" is cause of IBM willing to share the market in order to stabilize the very diverse computer industry at the time. Which is why Intel's x86 processors and Microsoft Windows are the standard now.

I got a new site by the way, I apparently did not update the link here on Hunting Nut.

www.northerndtool.com/...bm-pc-1980

Has the original tech documents that IBM was willing to sell (for a relatively small fee) that set the standard and made cloning the IBM PC easy. And remember IBM only went after people who copied their BIOS only, but once clean room BIOS software (ie software that was not copied directly from IBMs code, but does the same thing) IBM did not go after them.

I got a feeling, it was easier for IBM to standardize the market and allow people to want to clone their microcomputers (since they were not into Desktop computers before), so they can have less interfacing issues with their mainframe and minicomputers, then dealing with the dozen of hardware standards and software systems available in the late 70s early 80s.

Dimitri