> A mainframe is the biggest single system image you can get commercially
It depends. As we have seen the other day, HPE has a machine with more than 1024 logical cores, and they have machines available to order that can grow up to 16 sockets and 960 cores on a single image of up to 32TB of RAM. Their Superdome Flex goes up to 896 cores and 48TB of RAM.
I believe IBM's POWER line also has machines with more memory and more processing power, but, of course, that's not the whole story with mainframes. You count CPUs that run application code, but there are loads of other computers in there doing a lot of heavy-lifting so that the CPUs can keep running application code at 100% capacity with zero performance impact.
> It's the easiest, most reliable way to scale a classical transactional workload.
And that's where they really excel. Nobody is going to buy a z17 to do weather models or AI training.
It depends. As we have seen the other day, HPE has a machine with more than 1024 logical cores, and they have machines available to order that can grow up to 16 sockets and 960 cores on a single image of up to 32TB of RAM. Their Superdome Flex goes up to 896 cores and 48TB of RAM.
I believe IBM's POWER line also has machines with more memory and more processing power, but, of course, that's not the whole story with mainframes. You count CPUs that run application code, but there are loads of other computers in there doing a lot of heavy-lifting so that the CPUs can keep running application code at 100% capacity with zero performance impact.
> It's the easiest, most reliable way to scale a classical transactional workload.
And that's where they really excel. Nobody is going to buy a z17 to do weather models or AI training.