IBM Z is both the oldest and among the most modern of computing platforms. Launched as S/360 in 1964, the mainframe became synonymous with large-scale computing for business and remains the workhorse of enterprise computing for businesses worldwide. Most of the world's largest banks, insurers, retailers, airlines, and enterprises from many other industries have IBM Z at the center of their IT infrastructure. This article presents an overview of the evolution of the IBM Z microprocessors over the past six generations. The article discusses some of the underlying workload characteristics and how these have influenced the microarchitecture enhancements driving the performance and capacity improvements. The article then describes how the focus shifted over time from speeds and feeds to new features, functions, and accelerators, and presents some examples on improved availability, enhanced security and cryptography, and embedded data compression acceleration.

中文翻译：

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IBM Z 大型机处理器的历史

IBM Z 是最古老也是最现代的计算平台之一。大型机于 1964 年作为 S/360 推出，成为大型企业计算的代名词，并且仍然是全球企业企业计算的主力。大多数世界上最大的银行、保险公司、零售商、航空公司和来自许多其他行业的企业都将 IBM Z 置于其 IT 基础架构的中心。本文概述了 IBM Z 微处理器在过去六代中的演变。本文讨论了一些基本的工作负载特征，以及这些特征如何影响推动性能和容量改进的微架构增强。然后，文章描述了焦点如何随着时间的推移从速度和馈送转移到新特性、功能和加速器，