from Hacker News

IBM doubles its 14nm EDRAM density, adds hundreds of megabytes of cache

by insulanian on 3/8/20, 7:39 PM with 77 comments

• by baybal2 on 3/8/20, 9:02 PM

  I wonder if it will ever see a chance to go mainstream.

  The memory bottleneck is pretty much the only thing in CPU design that didn't see a dramatic improvement over the years. Its elimination is the only obvious improvement pathway still left with expectation of double digit performance gains.

  So we need either very big and very fast caches, or extremely wide and low latency memory. Both options are quite costly.

  Adding on die DRAM that can work at least as fast as 500mhz will surely require some specialty process with a lot of compromises like the one in the article.

  Gluing something like HBM2 to the die for a second option moves the cost from the specialty process to the specialty packaging. Not much better.

• by RantyDave on 3/8/20, 9:07 PM

  Twelve point two billion transistors. That's absolutely nuts. Does anyone have a ballpark figure for how much a 'drawer' of four of these things costs? What's it supposed to run, is this an Oracle/DB2 beast?

• by magicalhippo on 3/8/20, 8:31 PM

  Impressive tech. How big is the market for these machines these days? Like how many Z15 CPs would they expect to sell (assuming each Z15 install can vary a lot in size).

• by smartstakestime on 3/8/20, 8:16 PM

  This is my type of tech. Not glamorous but highly functional.

• by insulanian on 3/8/20, 11:42 PM

  Are there any modern initiatives around mainframe? What is IBM doing to promote it more to new generations?

  Are there any startups doing anything related to the mainframe?

  I was always fascinated by the tech around mainframe and am even thinking about moving into that space. I can imagine that a barrier to entry is high... or?