A living fossil: introduction to the s390x architecture

Claudio Imbrenda and Janosch Frank

57 min

57 min 2019-05-31

2019-05-31 332

332 Fahrplan

A tongue-in-cheek introduction to the s390x architecture, still used in IBM mainframes, focusing on the craziest or most unexpected features.

A tongue-in-cheek introduction to the s390x architecture, its history, its weirdest quirks, and its unexpected features. But also the cool bits!

Have you ever wondered why anybody would ever have a need for a *"Compare and swap and triple store"* instruction?

What about a *"Rotate then or selected bits"* instruction?

And what about vector BCD instructions? Or decimal floating point?

Have you ever wondered how an architecture would look like if it could access 16 distinct address spaces at the same time? Or... why?

No? *We don't care*! We will present those (and many more) instructions and features anyway!

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