OS/400 Servers Over Time: Stacking Up the Big Boxes

Even though the i5 570 machines using 2.2 GHz processors can scale from 8,400 to 58,500 Commercial Performance Workload (CPW) units of processing power using from two to 16 processor cores, and the i5 595 using from eight to 64 of the 1.9 GHz Power5 cores can scale from 26,700 to 184,000 CPWs of performance, there are very, very few--if any--customers in the world who deploy that much green-screen processing capacity. According to IBM's estimates last year, it didn't really expect anyone to need any more than about four cores of green-screen capacity, which is in the neighborhood of 12,000 CPWs using the 1.65 GHz Power5s. So why did IBM bother to make a 16-core i5 570 or a 64-way i5 595?