FREE online courses on Information Technology - Chapter 9 INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURES - FUTURE TRENDS IN ARCHITECTURE
The discussion in this chapter suggests that the role of the mainframe is
changing. Mainframes have been making a small comeback and are likely to be
around for a long time. After seven years of decline, vendors sold more
mainframes in 1994 than 1993, nearly one million computers. A market forecasting
firm predicts 25 percent annual growth for mainframe sales through the end of
the century. The old view of the mainframe as the single, central processor for
an organization is probably obsolete, but not the mainframe itself.
What is happening to mainframes, or large computers to rekindle their sales?
Mainframes are declining in cost because they can take advantage of some of the
same technology as PCs. It is anticipated that the cost of mainframe MIPS
(million instructions per second) will decline 50 to 75 percent during the last
part of the 1990s. Mainframes are undergoing dramatic changes in their
architecture as they become more modular or come to feature totally parallel
operations. Vendors are producing smaller, more powerful and more affordable
mainframes. They are switching from older, more expensively fabricated circuits,
to CMOS (complimentary mental oxide semiconductors), a less expensive
technology. This technology lets the manufacture put more logic on fewer chips
and circuit boards. IBM is also selling a line of mainframes that feature
parallel architectures using RISC based technology.
A basic requirement of any new design is that the mainframe remain compatible
with existing software and meet the timing requirements of on-line systems.
Within these requirements, designers are free to try novel approaches to the
hardware in an effort to improve the cost/performance characteristic of
mainframes.
The role of the mainframe is evolving. Instead of performing all calculations,
the mainframe will become an extremely powerful server on networks. It will
handle multi-billion-byte databases, providing data to clients on the networks.
The clients will do much of the processing of these data before returning them
to the mainframe server to update the database.
