[Gllug] Crashes (owing to the heatwave?)

[Rich Walker]

David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> On Friday, 8 Aug 2003, Chris Bell wrote:
> >   Rows of expensive cabinets give no indication of what is inside a modern
> >mainframe. I assume that a real computer does not have rows of risc chips in
> >lots of packaging that make them appear slightly better than rows of 486's.
> >   Do they use specialist chips, or groups of slightly better known chips
> >working in parallel to get longer words?
> 
> The S/390 uses the IBM/Motorola PowerPC CPUs, which are of course also
> found in Macintoshes (albeit not the exact same parts) and
> conventional memory.

Uses the POWER4 which comes as a bunch of multi-chip modules with
insane cooling - you get 1 or 2 CPU's per module, with a big 128MB L3
cache for each group of 4 or 8 CPUs

The reason for "1 or 2" CPU's is that the high-performance computing
crowd want memory bandwidth, and 2 cpu's in one module means lower
bandwidth.

Motorola have not made an interesting PowerPC chip for many years

This

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd46-1.html

will tell you about this chip... Worth a read.

cheers, Rich.


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