IBM z13 announced; why are people surprised?

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/13/the-new-ibm-z13-is-not-your-fathers-mainframe/

(pastebin: http://pastebin.com/TbuWu6LW )
(images: http://imgur.com/a/z4Vbs )

Yes technology wise it's all cool and all, yeah yeah big blue does it again, big data, big irons, et cetera, et cetera

But what gets me the most is the media response which seems to be "the mainframe is back" Where did it go? No where, if you look at IBM and other manufactures reports, they still have as many customers as ever, so why is technology news trying portray that mainframe computers are on their way out?

At what point did we or will we ever not need to make a massive number of calculations, do calculations of a extremely high complexity, or both, at a maximum efficiency that only specialized hardware can provide?

Is this like that "desktops are dead" FUD that shitheads who don't actually do work like to spread?

When you look at the technical reports about the new z13 it is amazing what it can do, so I'm not upset by people who are surprised by its capabilities, I am, but the large number of people surprised that mainframes even exist is troubling. I feel like it's indicative of a shift towards universal standards and if that is going to be generic ARM devices and x86 devices for everything there is very little we're going to be doing as well as we could.

Why did the trend go from trying everything and seeing what worked best for one specific task which lead to lots of technology that did lots of things REALLY well, to arbitrarily choosing one set of technologies, using it for everything and then just running said set of technologies into the ground? Did modern hardware capability spoil us so that we don't have to innovate?

Did modern hardware capability spoil us so that we don't have to innovate?

Yes. If we put as much time into writing good software as we do user interfaces and other chrome our software would be faster, more stable, and do things we can't even dream of today. If we put as much money into making RISC processors as we do CISC processors, or god forbid trying something totally new our computers would be orders of magnitude faster. If we narrowed down applications of hardware, we could design that hardware around that task and be able to do that task far better than any generic solution could.

>>1
The mainframe may have never gone away but the market isn't exactly growing either. You could argue that much of the growth in PC based servers with a common bus backplane constitutes a reinvention of the mainframe, but that doesn't help IBM much.

>>1,2
General purpose microprocessors will not stop killing dedicated hardware unless and until semiconductor processes stop scaling. It's been a slow decline thus far but I believe it will happen within 15 years.

ibm should do something good for the individual user again. I hate what Lenovo did for thinkpads. They gave them an ^anal _pounding.

>>3
I can't wait for the second microcomputer revolution when the computer engineers have to actually innovate to keep up with the computer scientists.

>>3
What was that new technology paradigm shit that I think HP said they had that "revolutionized architecture"? What was that again?

B-but the cloud!

>>6
Memristor? The Machine? Itanium?

If we put as much money into making RISC processors as we do CISC processors, or god forbid trying something totally new our computers would be orders of magnitude faster.

You are seriously deluded... Agree with the better software though.

hey guys lets talk about the mill cpu

>>9
I don't follow, RISC is objectively superior, so if it had marketshare so that we could have RISC CPUs in our desktops, our desktop computers would be faster

>>9
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/risccisc/

>>11
Please stop. Classical RISC is not "objectively superior"; it is dead for many good reasons. Modern architectures borrowed what was good from RISC and moved on. It is pointless to suggest any improvement stands to be made from implementing the questionable parts of a 20 year old design philosophy.

Acorn Risc Machine

>>12
No mention of the fact that memory bandwidth is now the bottleneck, instructions have to somehow be read from memory anyway, and not even a single occurrence of the word "cache"?

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/bibliography/index.html

The most recent reference from that article was almost 15 years ago. The period before the fall of NetBurst, when everyone was still chasing ridiculously high clock frequencies and the "RISC is the future" movement still running strong. I wish Intel didn't jump on the RISC bandwagon, since then we might've had Nehalem-level performance 5 years earlier.

>>13
More like 30 years now...

>>14
ARM has multicycle instructions, complex addressing modes, and predicated execution with uop-based decoupled front- and back-ends. It is hardly a pure RISC. MIPS is pure RISC - and it's a horrible performer:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188396-the-final-isa-showdown-is-arm-x86-or-mips-intrinsically-more-power-efficient/2

"Where's that promise of simple CPUs being faster and more efficient while also cheaper to design? I'm still waiting, Hennessy..."

>>15
leave those goalposts right where they are

>>16
The goalposts were left behind 15 years ago.

goalpost in my anus

goal

ATTENTION
ATTENTION
A GOAL HAS OCCURRED
THAT IS ALL

goto >>19

_{(stopping the dubsfaggot from dubsbumping)}