Re: Another routine desktop upgrade.
"...I'm always on the lookout for excitement, but I don't think my house is big enough or my electricity supply powerful enough to run an IBM mainframe...."
Well you can emulate an IBM Mainframe on a laptop, using the open source TurboHercules. An old 8-socket Nehalem-EX would give you 3.200 MIPS, which is a decent midsized Mainframe. If you got the latest 8-socket x86 you would get something around 10.000-15.000 MIPS. And software emulation is 5-10x slower than running native code, so if you ported the Mainframe software to x86, then the latest 8-socket x86 server would actually give 50-75.000 MIPS - which is what IBM's largest Mainframe gives today. In other words, Mainframe cpus are not really that fast. You need 20 ish Mainframe cpus to match one 8-socket x86 server. But Mainframes are extremely expensive for the performance you pay.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
