Yo Ain't My Main Man, No Mo [update]

Who really needs an IBM z/system anymore? Here's a report on the latest Xeon machines. Running OLTP, whether locally or over the innterTubes, in VT-200 mode (i.e., clients are mostly dumb and the server does all the real work) becomes more cost effective every day. As Holub said, updating applications mostly happens just on the centralized RDBMS. The Luddite client coders won't be happy, but cares?

The flagship model is the E7-8890 v4, a 165W processor supporting the full 24 cores in the HCC die with hyperthreading, offering 48 threads per CPU. At a base frequency of 2.2 GHz, this processor can be used in an eight-socket glueless configuration (an 8S implementation means 192 cores/384 threads) or up to 128 sockets using third party controllers. In the eight socket configuration, a system can support up to 24TB of DDR4 LRDIMMs (three modules per channel, 12 modules per socket, 256GB per module).

One might even speculate that Big Data stuff can be done on such a "PC". Price? About $7,000 for the chip.

[update]
Here's a list of parallel support in mainstream databases. Most real ones do. Yippee.