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Granite Rapids is also a better example because it's an enterprise processor with a huge monolithic die (almost 600 square mm).

A key distinction, however, is latency. I don't know about Granite Rapids, but sources show that Sapphire Rapids had an L3 latency around 33 ns: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/5th-gen-emerald-rapids-cpu.... According to the article, the L2 latency in the Tellum II chips is just 3.8 ns (about 21 clock cycles at 5.5 GHz). Sapphire Rapids has an L2 latency of about 16 clock cycles.

IBM's cache architecture enables a different trade-off in terms of balancing the L2 versus L3. In Intel's architecture, the shared L3 is inclusive, so it has to be at least as big as L2 (and preferably, a lot bigger). That weighs in favor of making L2 smaller, so most of your on-chip cache is actually L3. But L3 is always going to have higher latency. IBM's design improves single-thread performance by allowing most of the on-chip cache to be lower-latency L2.

They fund a lot of R&D in house and let people try crazy new ideas. Too bad it's just for a niche product.

They have a famous networking (optical and wireline) group doing a lot of state-of-the-art research, and they deploy these in their mainframe products.

There's no other company like it. They are, in a sense, exact opposite of Apple where all HW engineers are pushed for impossible deadlines and solutions that save the day. Most in house developed IP is then not competitive enough and at the end doesn't end up in production (like their generations of 5G modems and the IPs in these like data converters etc).

There is also no other place that will just implement conversions between utf formats, compression in hardware or various hashed and other crypto in hardware like they do.

> Cost constraints for your designs can be mostly be left aside, as there's no competition

I don’t think they neglect the migration of workloads to cloud platforms. Mainframes can only cost so much before it’s cheaper to migrate the workloads to other platforms and rewrite some SLAs. They did a ton of work on this generation to keep power envelope in the same ballpark of the previous generation, because that’s what their clients were concerned about.

Virtual L3 and L4 looks like a bad deal today since SRAM cell scaling has stalled quite badly in recent fabrication nodes. It's quite possible that future chip designs will want to use eDRAM at least for L4 cache if not perhaps also L3, and have smaller low-level caches where "sharing" will not be as useful.

There's also lots of Java as well, and IBM is making a big effort on porting existing Unix utilities to z/OS (which is a certified UNIX). With Linux, the choices are the same as with other hardware platforms. I assume you'll find lots of Java and Python running on LinuxONE machines.

Running Linux, from a user's perspective, it feels just like a normal server with a fast CPU and extremely fast IO.

You can do a lot of damage with some stored procedures. SQL/DB2 capabilities often go overlooked in favor of virtualizing a bunch of Java apps that accomplish effectively the same thing with 100x the resource use.

RPG, COBOL, PL/I, NEWP are the most used ones. Unisys also has their own Pascal dialect.

Other than that, there are Java, C, C++ implementations for mainframes, for a while IBM even had a JVM implementation for IBM i (AS/400), that would translate JVM bytecodes into IBM i ones.

Additionally all of them have POSIX environments, think WSL like but for mainframes, here anything that goes into AIX, or a few selected enterprise distros like Red-Hat and SuSE.

For applications or middlewares and systems and utilities?

For applications, COBOL is king, closely followed by Java for stuff that needs web interfaces. For middleware and systems and utilities etc, assembly, C, C++, REXX, Shell, and probably there is still some PL/X going on too but I'm not sure. You'd have to ask somebody working on the products (like Db2) that famously used PL/X. I'm pretty sure a public compiler was never released for PL/X so only IBM and possibly Broadcom have access to use it.

COBOL is best thought of as a domain specific language. It's great at what it does, but the use cases are limited you would be crazy to write an OS in it.

There is a thing called LinuxONE. That’s Linux for IBM mainframes. So basically you can run anything that runs on Linux (and can be compiled on s390x) on a mainframe.

It's something they'll run a batch for occasionally, but thats normal. Fabs are not like one long conveyor belt where a wafer goes in at the front, passes through a long sequence of machines and falls out finished at the end. They work in batches, and machines need reconfiguring for the next task all the time (if a chip needs 20 layers, they don't have every machine 20 times), so mixing different products and having products is normal. Low-volume products are going to be more expensive of course due to per-batch setup tasks being spread over fewer wafers.

In general scheduling of machine time and transportation of FOUPs (transport boxes for a number of wafers, the basic unit of processing) is a big topic in the industry, optimizing machine usage while keeping the number of unfinished wafers "in flight" and the overall cycle time low. It takes weeks for a wafer to flow through the fab.

It's probably more on the order of a thousand or so mainframe systems delivered per year, based on average lifespan of one of these systems and the ~10,000 or so existing mainframe customers.

Then you have to consider that each CPC drawer for a mainframe has 4 sockets. And there are multiple CPC drawers per maxed out system (I believe up to 4, so 16 sockets per mainframe). And some larger customers will have many mainframes setup in clusters for things like parallel sysplex and disaster recovery.

So probably more on the order of ~10's of thousands of these chips getting sold per year.

So definitely not high volume in CPU manufacturing terms. But it's not miniscule.

It's probably 100k in one run and then they are stored for future use.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!