I’ve never worked with major enterprise or government systems where there’s aging mainframes — the type that get parodied for running COBOL. So, I’m completely ignorant, although fascinated. Are they power hogs? Are they wildly cheap to run? Are they even run as they were back in the day?
A lot, just like today’s Mainframe and Super computers. They are calculating complex formulas and doing gigantic batch jobs, millisecond AI fraud detection etc. A regular computer or server will throttle a lot while they are designed to be loaded 100% of times. Dave Plummer of MS recently made a video of a 40TB RAM monster.
Did you ever look at how much today’s top of the line gaming rigs consume? ;-)