IBM i 五大特色之三 Powerful I/O Processor

IBM i 五大特色之三 Powerful I/O Processor

Hardware Integratio n

Whereas the engineering and scientific computing environment is compute-intensive (meaning users perform complex operations on a relatively small amount of data), the general business-computing environment is information-intensive (meaning users perform simple operations on a large amount of data). Because the IBM i was originally optimized for the general business environment, it contains hardware design characteristics that let it deliver outstanding performance in an information-intensive environment.

In a typical business transaction, an application program is loaded into main storage, and the main processor then begins to execute it. When the main processor encounters a request for data to be read from disk (for example), it delegates that request to the input/ output processor (IOP) that’s dedicated to the disk device. Then the main processor diverts its attention to another application program — the task that it’s dedicated to doing — and returns to the original program only when the data it requested earlier is available in main storage. Such a server design is excellent for information-intensive applications.