On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Christopher Smith wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Raymond Moyers [mailto:rmoyers_at_nop.org]
>
> > Today that campus worth of hardware is emulated in the hercules
> > s360/370/390/ zSeries emulator http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules
> > running on a PC running linux or winbloZ
>
> I do hope Sridhar will take his time to address this. :)
Well, if not I will. While hercules is WAY cool (I've played with it a
bit, along with OS/360 since it's "public domain"), it'll never beat the
real thing. On my shiny new Dual Athlon 1700+ (1.466GHz) (however I
suspect that hercules is only using one processor to decode/execute
instructions), I get a Super-Speedy 5MIPS rating at most. While this is
about 2x as much as my old Athlon 700 system gave, it's nowhere near as
fast as any modern S/390 or zSeries, and probably not even as fast as the
S/390 on a card that IBM use to sell with a PS/2 as a P/390.
Emulated hardware will _always_ be ages behind the real thing when the two
architectures are as difference as PC's and ESA/390 or zArchitecture (not
to mention disk I/O, memory I/O, and the mainframe's I/O subsystem in
general).
-- Pat
Received on Mon Apr 29 2002 - 11:00:41 BST