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Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more!

Dave's Garage · explainer · Watch on YouTube

Computer architecture & CPUsCloud, DevOps & reliability

What it is

Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as an accessible tour of modern mainframes that compares them sensibly to ordinary server setups.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2023, last 2024

What HN commenters said

  1. “This is an amazing 23-minute video by the Microsoft programmer who developed the Windows NT Task Manager, among other things.”

    Tour of IBM z16 and Telum chip with engineers.

    virgulino, 2024-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy”

  2. “I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes”

    Passion behind IBM mainframes with physical robustness tests.

    bane, 2023-12 · Recommendation · in “The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'”

  3. “It does a reasonably good job at comparing mainframes to a regular server setup.”

    Compares mainframes to regular servers sensibly.

    Tor3, 2024-02 · Recommendation · in “New IBM LinuxONE 4 Express – Rack-mounted pre-configured Linux mainframe”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: ibm z16, mainframe, reliability, hardware, enterprise computing

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