System360 Hardwired vs. Microcoded 393

the 370-195 had the "new" (non-virtual memory) 370 instructions (like insert character under mask, etc).

i was also told the 370-195 had better fault tolerant characteristics and some retry of soft-errors (compared to 360-195) ... some statistic that the number of components in the 195 ... the probability of some kind of soft failures was on the order of daily..

sjr had 195 up thru the late 70s ... and besides the supercomputer venue some of the large financial houses and airlines had them for high end transaction processing (financial transaction switching and airline res system). the eastern airline res system was one of that i believe ran on 195 (south florida) and was part of the input into amadeus (my wife served stint as amadeus chief architect for a time).

that was one of the recent references to the nail in FS (future system) coffin

i got involved with the 195 group when they were look at adding dual i-stream support to 370-195 ... from the software standpoint it would look like dual-processor operation ... but it was very akin to the recent processor hardware threading ... aka the scenario was that most codes weren't able to keep the pipeline full because most branches causing pipeline stall-drain (mip-thruput nominally was about half of peak). there was some hope that dual i-stream support would keep the pipeline full ... and show aggregate peak thruput.

recent past post in this thread

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