Path: csiph.com!news.mixmin.net!eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: TOPS-20 Boot Camp for VMS Users 05-Mar-2022 Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2022 07:55:42 -1000 Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 61 Message-ID: <87h6xk7kkh.fsf@localhost> References: <20220303163807.e700772e93bf9d81a0d8646d@eircom.net> <5H6UJ.233887$Rza5.134368@fx47.iad> <1480498945.668113352.883426.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> <87fsnxl8dt.fsf@nightsong.com> <1585529182.668284324.850327.peter_flass-yahoo.com@news.eternal-september.org> <871qopg8qi.fsf@localhost> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: reader01.eternal-september.org; posting-host="214984124f6e8212942819465b2eb0c2"; logging-data="2466401"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/5N1eiZavLlgE2dsuk71yrzQG/U7o7SSQ=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/28.1 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:K+5921LEIb//p+RhpdsN55Eeqxk= sha1:DeqwX84ojeLsRrFk+OV4/v3ui+0= Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:223246 Charlie Gibbs writes: > After all, MIPS really stands for > "Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed". ... "stamping out" benchmarks for mainframes ... not just MIPS (conflating that they are actual count of instructions frequently highlighting significant RISC/CISC differences ... rather than industry benchmark is number of program iterations per second compared to reference platform) ... but also TPC (transactions/sec, $$/transaction, power/transaction) and other of the ilk ... however participate in benchmarks for their non-mainframe platforms. reminiscence of the enormous marketing FUD from the 70s Future System days where internal politics from the Future System project was killing off 370 efforts ... and the lack of new IBM 370 products was credited with giving the 370 clone makers their market foothold (leaving IBM marketing little else but "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt") some FS details: http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html before that ... killing off ACS/360 because executives were afraid that it would advance state-of-the-art too fast and IBM would loose control of the market: https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html above list some of the ACS/360 features that don't show up until more than 20yrs later with ES/9000. another FUD trivia: 3880 was designed to handle the 3mbyte/sec 3380 transfer speed ... along with data streaming channel architecture (previously enormous channel protocol chatter with end-to-end handshake for ever byte transferred, 3mbyte channels allowed multi-byte transfer per end-to-end handshake). The trout/3090 effort had number of channels assuming 3880 was similar to the previous 3830 but with 3380 3mbyte/sec transfer. However, 3880 had special hardware path for data transfer but everything else was done by an extremely slow "vertical" microcode processor (not the much faster 3830 "horizontal" microcode processor). When trout/3090 finally found out that the 3880 channel busy would be significantly larger than anticipated, they realized that had to significantly increase the number of channels ... in order to achieve IOPS required to achieve targeted system throughput. It turns out that the increase in channels required an additional (expensive) TCM. They joked that they were going to bill the 3880 organization for the increase in 3090 manufactoring cost (additional TCM). Note that marketing eventually respins the significant increase in channels for 3090 (compared to previsious mainframe genereations) ... needed to compensate for the enormous increase 3880 channel busy ... as making the 3090 and wonderful I/O machine. This is somewhat analogous to the peak I/O z196 benchmark of 2M IOPS reqired 104 FICON (FICON protocol running over FCS) compared to IOPS for single native FCS of over a million. recent post on linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mainframe-channel-io-lynn-wheeler/ -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970