Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more!

DDR4 RDIMM memory is 3200 MT/s at 64bit (or up to 72bit w/ ECC) which 8bits/byte would give you 25.6GB/s. what you are missing is that memory is multi-channel. Intel Xeons can go up to 8-way memory, AMD Epyc can go up to 12 way. So you're talking 204GB/s or 307GB/s. DDR5 RDIMMS are even faster so throughput would be greater. What I do not know is the inherit latency of memory access (core to core, or package to package) where I suspect the mainframe would be better (lower latency). Is main memory on the z16 static ram or dynamic?

Likewise PCIe I/O is up there on server platforms, a dual processor AMD Epyc has 128 PCIe lanes (Gen 4 for Milan, or Gen 5 for Genoa) for a total of 256 PCIe lanes of generation type.

However should be stated that just pure lane counts does not compare well. Mainframes are set up to OFFLOAD a lot of signal & I/O processing much more than mid-range/server. (concept in the server world is just taking hold with dedicated processing units (APU/DPU) but mainframes have been doing that forever.

There are a bunch of other items as well, but it's like comparing an armored personnel carrier to a car. Both can get you from A to B but one is much more robust. :)

I am a long time programmer analyst on an IBM power machine but I still call it AS400 . We are a loyal breed to these machines. They perform so well.

If ain't broke don't fix it Windows XP great Windows version

Audio is a little to hot my free

can it make espresso?

Thanks to AI, AI supercoms are looking very much like the mainframe of 20th century, however it does not mean mainframes will be revived. Instead single desktop computer becomes more like mainframe of 20th century.

That vibe test looked terrible we would have stopped test because swinging doors would cause injury to personnel.

Non geek here: and so what and who cares and how will this improve our lives? IBM is great at marketing and always being the next great thing in tech, but what exactly HAVE they contributed since the PC in the 80's?

40TB of ram, that is insane

What I would love to know about mainframe is the threat and vulnerability aspect. In my experience, most of the scanning platforms that search for vulnerabilities do a really poor, if at all, job of discovering threats against the mainframe. This is especially concerning because, as you say, the backbone of finance is ran on IBM Mainframe.

👍

Almost a billion transistors of L1/2? Cache per core. That's kinda nuts especially since SRAM is a major power hog.

i dont know why, I keep smiling at these nice powerful mainframes.

That’s where they store their racial hiring quota information!

Killer earthquakes and evil freight handlers!!!😮😮😮

And...a lot of thirsty people ARE OUT THERE...
HMMM

They have their own clouds.. and it never rains in the plains..
Oh my

Pfff, 48 bit addressing getting tight.

Money and IBMz make the world go round.

NOTHING LIKE Q-BASIC COMPILING LATE 1970S HIGH SCHOOL MAINFRAME I REMEMBER, AWESOME!

Now, do the SOFTWARE side of a Mainframe. What OS runs them? What languages are supported and mostly used? How do software engineers architect large systems designed to run on mainframes?

Thanks, Dave

Do POWER next time. I had to deep dive w/ IBM into POWER for a client once, and was blown away by its virtualization capabilities. Hyperthreading (2 logical processors at boot time)?! Hah, how about 8 logical processors that can be reconfigured on the fly. Sadly, fewer and fewer clients are renewing their POWER systems, and managing POWER is dated.

TLDW: Mainframes do what they have always done.

Basically. Monster I/O.

My phone also has 40tb RAM and 200 cores.

Thanks for a fascinating tour. So much info; I will have to watch again.

I’ve been in IT for 26 years as an IP network guy on mostly distributed systems in the financial sector. Mainframes are still a confusing mess for most people as I can attest most IT people think they’re an archaic technology that has surprisingly not died. But I’ve been recently working on a project to put a firewall in between Z16 systems so I had to get familiar with all the applications from a network perspective and I’ve grown quite a respect for even how efficient the network and port usage is on a mainframe and this video really shatters that strangely ongoing myth in the IT world. I learned some 60%+ Fortune 1000 financial companies still use them and that alone speaks volumes but as this video clearly shows not only is it a myth that these are old and outdated but quite contrarily very modern and cutting edge.

XP (eXtra Painful), you were kidding right? I would understand NT but not XP. Must be non network connected and just runs as a process management device.

Im thinking about getting a nas that has 32tb worth of storage. And this beats it with just its ram. Thats wild.

Cable management is absolutely awful, they should be ashamed

its just this random wish that i want to see this hardware live , or just see a data centre, im not in IT or anything , but it's just very beautiful imo lol

Oh this is great value, very high info per minute , thank you

Never saw the machines with my own two eyes, but I used to be on the user end of an IBM mainframe running CICS. By far the fastest and most reliable asset managment I"ve ever tried. Perhaps not the most intuitive, iirc the first few weeks was a pretty steep hill 😅

Need a content warning on those vibration and topple tests. Those poor machines!

Look at all that DIVERSITY. 🤣

I am not surprised, we went full cycle. Previously was mainframe with dumb consoles within the premise, then we when to two tier, three tiers. Now we are going back to cloud computing which is "mainframe". I wouldn't want to say that the mainframe from the past is the same as the mainframe now, because OS has evolved. But my impression of mainframe is still the same, you have a dumb console and whatever you are working on is a master server somewhere.

My dad's entire computer programming career was on "big iron" computers, and it's very interesting to see what they're like today. 🙂

It will still be as useless as IBM itself.

Here comes Skynet!

Flashing cuts, rapid cuts, back to flashing frames, now to irrelevant shots, now back to flicker footage.

If you wouldn't mind sharing how you even started this field, like how did you get your foot through the door?

You need shit to run your shit

Mainframes are just freaking insanely engineered - the knowledge to do all what with data at this reliability and basically zero downtime is unraveled worldwide

sure. let's buy something from IBM and talk to someone in India for support

Meanwhile, Windows95 manual: "Microsoft recommends reinstalling the operating system every 6 six months for maximum reliability."

But joke aside, when I win the lotto, I'm buying one. Why? To put Linux on it and watch "atop" running nonstop.

Many companies make these large water cooled computer clusters. As a computer scientist I could never understand the rational, and your explanations are not compelling either. Then I found out that the main reason for the continued growth in data centers is to receive Federal subsidy reimbursement for things like serving popup ads and making robocalls.

I want one

Ok, serious question, this isn't a bait. What does windows 11/10 offer over windows 7? Why can't it be backwards compatible? Why is TPM 2.0 necessary?