John,
Rude had a good reply regarding I/O. The one benefit
that can't be overlooked versus 390s is the amount of
memory. Future hardware will have 21364 CPUs and beyond
and CPU to main memory bandwidth around 6 GByte/sec,
interprocessor bandwidth of 10 GByte/sec and I/O bandwidth
of 3.2 GByte/sec per CPU.. here are some details:
theregister.co.uk
That and the initial 32 CPU Wildfire will have 244 PCI
busses, each bus a number of controller cards, each controller 40-80 disks, I think it can handle quite a few
disks, i.e. storage.
But more importantly since in a future setting with denser
memories, Terabyte memory machines won't be that uncommon
(2-4 years out) that memory makes for a great disk cache,
in fact if you are mining a Terabyte of data, it fits in
memory, etc.
I suspect Wildfire and similar machines will scale far
beyond mainframes in I/O capabilities .. this will take
2-4 years to come about but will happen.
64-bit strengths.
Rob |
