If you want to know where AMD is fucking up its killing Thuban and AM3.

Yes, I was just looking for a PII X2 565 (did the 570 actually ever ship?). Seems AMD doesn't ship those anymore, newegg has discontinued them, about the only place to get them is doggy 3rd tier vendors.

Anyway, if they won't make something I want to buy, then that sort of seals the deal. I'm willing to put up with being a few percent slower than intels flagship (especially if it costs 1/2), but not having anything in a market is just stupid.

Just think, if this keeps up, it will be possible to make money, by exchanging your dollars for pennies and selling them on the commodities market.... Then repeat....

Of course, that is sort of what caused the last bust.

But, its telling if the smaller denominations cannot be produced effectively because the base metals are to expensive. Worse yet is the raw manufacturing cost is almost 1/2...

On the positive side, no one will counterfeit something that is worth less than the materials used to make it.

If this takes off, apple could probably beat it with just a ios app emulator for osx, and a decent remote desktop app for ios. I have a couple pads, and I just open a RDP session if I need a windows only app. Frankly the kind of heavyweight windows apps that dont run on an ipad arent going to suddenly stop consuming tons of CPU.

  Its funny, thats what i'm doing now because my desktop browser is better/faster than the one built into the tablet.

Exactly, the question long term becomes, at what cost/transaction does it make sense to throw all that legacy software away, and recreate it on a system where the cost/transaction is significantly less.

You can hire a lot of programmer/hours to rewrite a system, using the cost savings going from a $1.5M/year to $120K/year system, over a life span of multiple decades.

Outside of BCD mechanisms, I think what you are trying to describe is called "decimal floating point", and is an IEEE standard. IBM likes to talk about decimal floating point, because even lowly x86 had BCD hardware support since day one (think AAA). IBM even likes to show benchmarks where their hardware DFP is faster than DFP using the same formats on intel. The problem is that DFP has a couple different storage mechanisms, and naturally IBM has compared the one were they do best against the one intel does worst at. In the end, apples to apples, they come out about the same. Surely not worth a 10x price difference for a few percent in IBM's favor, which ends up being application specific anyway.

Yes, you can pull the whole blade, if the application is cluster aware. Just about any modern DB can be run like this, as can your favorite web server. Most "enterprise" applications are designed to run in a loosely coupled environment.

Except that the HP Blade cluster has nothing on the mainframe in terms of reliability and data integrity.

Got any real numbers to back that up?

No? Maybe its because most of the failures, on both are due to software instead of hardware. There is nothing magical about the software on a zseries. If anything it seems more likely for a system programmer to screw up some JCL and destroy something important, than for the esx administrator to accidentally delete an image.

The fusionIO disks, are expensive, so are the texas memory system ones, but they are still an order of magnitude cheaper than anything available for zseries. Oh, and putting a fusionIO PCI board in your server, will probably increase its transaction numbers beyond anything achievable for less than 9 figures in the mainframe space.

So, sure 1TB of memory, 64 processors, a couple 8/16Gb FC adapters/infiniband/etc, fusionIO boards, etc, your x86 might cost $100k, but its going stomp all over a mainframe that costs $1M.

And they (modern x86 servers) have ECC on every bus from the registers to the disk, and cost about 1/10 (or better) than a similar zeries.

There is a reason IBM doesn't publish benchmarks and prices for these things. I recently got a machine from IBM, which costs more than my house, and is slower than a 486. IO rates? Same, its got 8GBit FICON, but doesn't seem to be able to drive more than a small fraction. I'm sure I could spend a few million to unlock the processors, and a few more IO boards, and more than 8GB of RAM. Then it might be fast enough to keep up with the DL580's in the rack next to it.

Plus, the DL580 can have linux installed and running in under an hour, the mainframe? If its running in under a few days its a small miracle. The management aspects, are a total joke. There is more processing power in PCs connected to the thing for management/translation/etc (5 of them!) than it has.