this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
64 points (95.7% liked)

Technology

59378 readers
5932 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s
[email protected]
[email protected]
L4s
enu
64
How much power do older mainframes need (if they're actually even run)? (self.technology)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by ShittyBeatlesFCPres to c/technology
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I’ve never worked with major enterprise or government systems where there’s aging mainframes — the type that get parodied for running COBOL. So, I’m completely ignorant, although fascinated. Are they power hogs? Are they wildly cheap to run? Are they even run as they were back in the day?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Blaster_M 7 points 11 months ago

Modern systems do a lot more work per second than these old machines, while drawing less power. If you were to collect a large enough collection of mainframes to equal the performance of a modern rack server, you would need 10-1000 times the power to run the old stuff, depending on how far back you want to go - even 10 year old hardware can cost 4-10 times more in electric bill compared to a modern server with the same total performance level.