[Shivetya]

I am on POWER8 at work, the wiki article [1] gives a great description of the advantages of many cores per chip though ours only has 6/12 cores. Part of our hardware configuration to migrate from POWER7 to POWER8 was to have 40g of memory per core available. I think POWER7 was 30g. We use this in the iSeries environment but we have pSeries machines with the same hardware running AIX/Oracle and POWER7 VMs running many *nix implementations.

In my usage case, the core/thread count really helps DB2's SQL implementation as an iSeries is effectively a giant DB2 database with extras added on. Hence query engine (SQE/CQE see old doc [2] on our machine can make great use of many cores/threads. When serving data to intensive batch applications as well as thousands of warehouse users and double that through web services access to data is the name of the game.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER8 [2] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/ssw_i5_54/rza... <- that is quite a few years old but describes the query engines available - CQE is 'legacy' and SQE is modern

[robbyt]

Have you compared performance of the DB running in Linux on a property sized Intel/Xeon server?

I've seen several mainframe companies dogmatically believing their sales rep their workload is special and needs a high-end system. But none of them I've talked to have actually tested for themselves.