Re: 1 IBM Mips equals 4MHz x86

Actually (referencing Kebabbert's comment), it's not likely that a Nehalem can come anywhere near the performance of a modern mainframe. People have been predicting the death of mainframes for thirty years, and they're still what keep the world turning.

Perhaps some information on the systems-level architecture would be illuminating.

An IBM z10 can be configured with sixteen quad-core processors clocked at 4.4GHz, with 3MB of L2 cache per core and 24MB of four-core-shared L3 cache. These processors have four 13GBps memory ports, two 48GBps SMP hub ports, and two 17GBps I/O ports. There are often as many ancillary processors (for handling I/O, accelerating Java, etc) processors as "regular" processors in such a system, depending on the configuration.

Another important aspect of mainframe design is reliability. There's a great deal of internal redundancy in these machines...you can walk up and put a bullet into one of these racks and, chances are, you'll never know it unless you go look at the OS error log.

This is not PC hardware; there are reasons they cost millions. Be glad your bank transactions won't be handled by Nehalem machines.