1. Withdraw the penny, nickel, paper dollar bill, 2 dollar bill, and 5 dollar bill from circulation;
2. Introduce 2 and 5 dollar coins and a 500 dollar bill;
3. Substantially increase production of the dollar and half dollar coins;
4. If the Republicans in Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling without conditions, the U.S. Mint would issue one or more 1 trillion dollar coins which are deposited with the Federal Reserve. These coins would feature the likeness of former President Ronald Reagan on one side and a quotation from the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on the other: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

Casualties in the withdrawals would be Lincoln (penny and 5 dollar bill), Jefferson (nickel and 2 dollar bill), and Washington (1 dollar bill). Consequently Jefferson would appear on the new 2 dollar coin, and Lincoln would appear on the new 5 dollar coin. Washington already appears on the quarter, and he'd stay there. The dime (FDR) and half dollar coin (JFK) would also remain the same. The presidential series of dollar coins would continue, but the existing Sacagawea dollar coin would be issued concurrently and thereafter as planned. The new 500 dollar bill would depict Martin Luther King on one side and the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on the other. It would also be physically larger than the other denominations, and it would be distinctly, tastefully, vibrantly multicolored. Hamilton would remain on the 10 dollar bill, Andrew Jackson on the 20 dollar bill, Grant on the 50 dollar bill, and Franklin on the 100 dollar bill.

IBM no longer rates their servers in MIPS, actually. They rate them in PCIs and rPerfs and CPWs.

Actually, it has that too now: IBM introduced hardware decimal floating point in 2008 to its mainframes (IEEE754-2008). Only IBM seems to have done that (on POWER7 as well). The zEC12 has that on every core; crypto too.

What if Intel had continued boosting clock speed (within power and cooling constraints) and employed other improvements? IBM has done both, and I applaud that. It's important to them (and to many of their customers) that they keep working hard to improve the performance of each thread, and, golly, they keep pulling rabbits out of the hat.

No, no typo. There's indeed Flash Express -- and yes, IBM's engineers have figured out a way to add yet another memory tier using (very high quality) flash memory. The processor can directly address it -- it's all mapped within the 64-bit virtual address space from what I've read. Yes, it's slower than DRAM but it's faster than storage-attached SSD (which at least has a longer distance to travel). Flash Express is great for things like paging, memory dumps, gigantic in-memory databases, and certain things that Java wants, so that's how operating systems and databases will use it. IBM even encrypts everything that lands on this memory-addressable flash, just in case someone tries to physically rip it out of the server. (Yes, they thought of that.)

Well, no. Right tool for the right job and all. You can buy the world's most expensive Olympic racing bicycle, but it won't haul an Airbus fuselage to its factory. There are many problems that cannot be solved with infinite amounts of money wrongly applied.

No, your correction is partially incorrect. It's 384MB of L4 cache minimum up to 1.5GB maximum per zEC12.

Well, if so -- no idea, really -- then run UnixBench on an Intel Xeon. I see that IBM sells those, too, as it happens. Now how does UnixBench help me run my business better, more securely, more reliably, etc? I've never worked for a business (or government) that runs UnixBench to solve any real business problem(s).

Only test results? (Yes, 5.5 GHz is fast. A test -- or even a spec sheet -- will tell you that.) But aren't real world results more useful? Go visit any large bank's (for example) data center if they'll let you. How many transactions, how much batch, etc. (and concurrently) do they push through their (one or two) IBM mainframe(s)? And has it ever quit? Is it secure? Does it...work?

So you don't like my benchmark then and want another benchmark? OK. I chose a perfectly reasonable benchmark: number of servers (X) to deliver a particular real-world business outcome, where smaller X is better. A benchmark is simply a measurement to assess particular criteria (such as X) against a particular outcome (such as running a bank). I can agree that that an IBM zEnterprise EC12 server is not the answer to every IT problem. It is, however, the answer to many. And if you can't agree to that, then you simply have more to learn. (How exciting!)

Yes, you could do that. Multiple images, actually. And that's basically what these servers do automatically. There are 4 levels of cache, main memory (which is RAID-protected actually, called RAIM -- only IBM does that), and there's another optional level of directly processor-addressable memory called Flash Express which is nonvolatile -- that's new, too. It works particularly well for fast paging, in-memory databases, memory dumps, etc. Then you go into fiber-attached and heavily cached solid state disk, fast disk, nearline disk, tape libraries. There are a lot of storage layers, and they're all very big.

OK, now go license 64 cores of Oracle DB (for example) and get less performance than one core on a zEC12, as you say. I'll help you out: you'd probably pay about $1.5M in database software licensing plus $300K+ in annual maintenance for your 64 X86 cores versus $47K and $9.4K on a zEC12 core. And that's one cost factor among many, not the only one. So which server is "cheaper"? Is a bicycle cheaper than a truck? (Not an Olympic racing bicycle, probably.) It depends on what you're trying to do. Though I've noticed that the average Slashdot poster hasn't a freakin' clue about IT economics, sadly.

OK, here's a benchmark. You're welcome to try running an entire large bank (for example) on one server -- your choice. OK, two servers: I'll allow you one additional for off-site disaster recovery of all development, test, and production workloads, including concurrent batch and online, for all the bank's security zones. Choose wisely, Grasshopper.

Yes, everybody does that (out-of-order execution, pipelining, etc., etc.) And then...you still need to keep the CPU well fed to boost performance. Enormous 4-level caches help do that. Having a continuous 5.5 GHz clock speed is also quite helpful. So is having 101+ cores that can access the same cache rather than, say, 8 such cores. And at least a couple hundred (at least) other IBM performance tricks, many of which cost money to deliver and thus probably won't find their way into save-a-nickel parts of the market any time soon. It also very, very seriously helps when you design both hardware and software together, as the late great Steve Jobs (among others) reminded us all.

No, that's not a correct supposition -- quite the opposite, actually. All processors, including Intel X86, use microcode (or what IBM calls millicode) to a degree. IBM knows it well. After all, they invented microcode/millicode in the System/360 in 1965. But IBM uses microcode comparatively less nowadays than other processor architectures. The vast majority of zEC12 instructions are implemented entirely in hardware, including IEEE-754-2008 decimal floating point as an example. There's some really, really interesting new stuff in the instruction set, like the first transactional memory ("transaction execution facility") instructions in a commercial server, and some "feedback" instructions that can tell Java applications/the JVM how to dynamically tune itself in a live running environment. Very cutting edge -- so cutting edge I've got to crack open some engineering manuals to try to figure out what they've done, although they probably need to write those manuals.