MainframeComputer
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IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier
Ten-core, 2.4GHz Xeons? Pshaw. IBM is used to the kind of clock speeds and brute force power that lead to Europe-dominating supercomputers. Big Blue has no intentions of letting its guard down when it unveils its next generation processors at the upcoming Hot Chips conference: the company is teasing that the "zNext" chip at the heart of a future System z mainframe will ramp up to 5.5GHz -- that's faster than the still-speedy 5.2GHz z196 that has led IBM's pack since 2010. For those who don't need quite that big a sledgehammer, the technology veteran is hinting that its upcoming Power7+ processors will be up to 20 percent faster than the long-serving Power7, whose current 4.14GHz peak clock rate may seem quaint. We'll know just how much those extra cycles mean when IBM takes to the conference podium on August 29th, but it's safe to say that our databases and large-scale simulations won't know what hit them.
NASA pulls the plug on the mainframe computer era
It's the end of another era at NASA, although this one was perhaps more inevitable than others. Chief Information Officer Linda Cureton announced in a blog post over the weekend that the agency's last mainframe computer was shut down this month, marking an end to decades of room-filling computers. Of course, that last mainframe was considerably more recent than that pictured above. It was an IBM Z9 (pictured at the source link below), still quite a behemoth and useful for certain applications, but deemed unnecessary by NASA in the face of other more flexible alternatives. Feeling nostalgic or curious about those days gone by? You can find a bit of mainframe history at the links below.
