Hardware
With the launch of IBM’s z12 mainframe engine, one can expect higher clock speed and making it possible to do anything and everything, to achieve and boost the single-thread performance. Companies are charging thousands of dollars per core of an engine. With all the latest upgrades, it will run through all day and perform online transaction processing, and execute single-thread big batch jobs throughout the night. A couple of years ago the z11 engine was announced in zEnterprise 196 servers. With the launch of z12 in zEnterprise / EC12, the engines are more powerful by 25%, that is around 1600 MIPS in comparison to z11. The capacity of the system is nearly 50% higher at around 75,000 MIPS. It’s quite possible to achieve that 50% increase in scale. But it’s really difficult to achieve a 25% increase in single-thread performance, considering that the previous generation of mainframe engines had been operating at 5.2GHz.
IBM has packed as many hot processing parts (these z12 chips operate at roughly 300 watts) into a cabinet as possible using its packaging, ceramics, and cooling capabilities. A full-fledged System zEnterprise EC12-HA1 system, in this case, has four processor books and five sockets, each with six-core z12 engines, for a sum of 120 raw compute engines. Up to 101 of these engines can be programmed to operate z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, z/TPF, or Linux, operate as zIIP or zAAP coprocessors to speed up DB2 or Java workloads or assist system I/O and clustering operations within the box.
