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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

given that no one seems to want to use them anymore

According to a 2024 Forrester Research report, mainframe use is as large as it's ever been, and expected to continue to grow.

Reasons include (not from the report) hardware reliability and scalability, and the ability to churn through crypto-style math in a fraction of the time/cost of cloud computing.

Report is paywalled, but someone on HN might have a free link.

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"Crypto-style" here, I am guessing--but not entirely certain--from a downstream comment, is intended as cryptographic in the more general sense, and not "cryptocurrency" as "crypto"-alone is often used for these days?

This is correct.

Whether the Bitcoin bros want to believe it or not, they didn't invent the word "crypto."

Nobody tell them it even pre-dates computers!

Consider me skeptical. A mainframe has to be the least cost effective "crypto-style" math machine you could imagine.

They have a lot of cryptographic functionality built directly into hardware, and IBM is touting quantum resistant cryptography as one of the key features. You won't mine Bitcoin on one, but, if you are concerned a bad actor could get a memory or disk dump of your system and store it until quantum computers become practical, IBM says they have your back.

I'd expect them to be significantly better than the competition in that area given the large part of the CPU that is a dedicated coprocessor specifically for crypto (called CPACF). There is much less area given to crypto on x86_64.

Of course we are talking about encryption here. TLS and AES etc etc. Not Bitcoin mining, which would indeed not be very cost effective.

Those analyst reports are kind of bought and paid for by vendors BTW.

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