back to article Unisys lights up Xeon-based mainframes

Mainframe maker Unisys has made no secret of the fact that its long-term goal is to stop making its own mainframe engines and run both of its MCP and OS 2200 operating system platforms atop machines using Intel's Xeon processors. That day has not yet arrived, but with the delivery of the Xeon 7500 processors this year and a …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maybe this is me being hopelessly ignorant

    I understand that mainframes have their own very special use cases, modus operandi, feature sets, and so on and so forth, thoug don't ask me for specifics, I don't know. Still and all, considering all that, I'm left with a bit of a question.

    What is this thing supposed to be doing other than heat the room?

    Or are these MIPS figures not comparable to other, non-mainframe, MIPS figures? Anybody care to share a spot of light?

    1. David Beck

      Uptime

      Uptime, in Nov 1978 I was told by Phillips that I could have access to one of their mainframe systems for an engineering update on New Years day, when the system was to be brought down for such maintenance. It had been running without fault since the previous New Years day. Mainframes have gotten a lot more stable since then and I would no longer need to take the whole system for that engineering change, just take the bit I needed off line for a while.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    MCP

    The beauty of MCP and the EAE stack is that its an unparalleled modular and stable setup. True, It doesn't have the ironclad image of the Z fair enough, but what you have is a mainframe a small team of 1-4 people can run with truly unbelievable uptimes. In that respect, its truly remarkable.

    I'd gladly ditch AIX to go back to working on this kit, I just hope the Scorpion emu does the original hardware justice what with the Burroughs kit having native high level cpu code, then again, the sense of Unisys having IBM fabbed chips of their proprietary IP was always going to be an issue.

  3. David Beck
    Boffin

    I'd love to see how they replace the private CMOS

    Given that MCP runs on top of an architecture that includes data typed 48 bit words, "typed" as in this word contains an integer and this word contains a bit of a string is a hardware/firmware function and OS2200 runs on a ones compliment 36 bit word architecture (ones compliment is the one with both positive and negative zero). They are going to need a lot more go than a Xeon chip to fake that level difference.

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