22nm is pretty close to the smallest; the fabs are ramping up for 14 in intel's case, and 16 for global foundries' case, but you're not gonna find much on the shelves right now with a smaller foundry. While SIMD's everywhere, dedicated crypto is fairly recent, with IBM notably doing elliptic curve acceleration, and dedicated compression is something that is new. On the other side, most of the CPU improvements they are touting are things everyone else is doing -- wider SIMD units, more cache, etc.
However, that's ignoring what's made a mainframe fast and expensive for the past several decades. Mainframes still slaughter all comers when it comes to I/O, and this is no different. When you've got up to 320 fibre links available, you're gonna have no problem keeping those processors busy.
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22nm is pretty close to the smallest; the fabs are ramping up for 14 in intel's case, and 16 for global foundries' case, but you're not gonna find much on the shelves right now with a smaller foundry. While SIMD's everywhere, dedicated crypto is fairly recent, with IBM notably doing elliptic curve acceleration, and dedicated compression is something that is new. On the other side, most of the CPU improvements they are touting are things everyone else is doing -- wider SIMD units, more cache, etc.
However, that's ignoring what's made a mainframe fast and expensive for the past several decades. Mainframes still slaughter all comers when it comes to I/O, and this is no different. When you've got up to 320 fibre links available, you're gonna have no problem keeping those processors busy.