Amdahl cranks up the power

Amdahl has brought new arms to the mainframe performance power league with a revised roadmap for its 800 series CMOS processors, writes Jonathan Lambeth.

The company said that the top-of-the-range 12 processor system will now yield 1,000 Mips when it ships in the first quarter of next year.

This surpasses IBM?s top-of-the-range 900 Mips G5 Turbo announced earlier this year, which is due for release in September.

Amdahl hopes the performance margin will persuade users thinking of upgrading their mainframes to wait for its 800 series. Existing 500 and 700 series Amdahl models will be able to upgrade with a simple board swap.

IBM, however, is also likely to improve processor performance in its own models later this year.

The Amdahl mainframe will also offer a hardware partitioning feature, the Multiple Server Feature. This will enable users to run between two and four servers within the single mainframe box. This will allow them to spread workloads between virtual servers.

Analysts said that while sales of mainframes have increased significantly over the past two years, profit margins have dropped equally fast, leaving vendors struggling to achieve significant returns.