IBM’s new Z13 mainframe is a hulking silicon beast. It packs the “world’s fastest microprocessor”, is twice as fast as most commercial servers, packs 300 per cent more memory and will be used for… shopping.
That’s perhaps not too surprising given the size of the online shopping market. But this thing can sure handle the biggest of sprees: it will chomp though up to 2.5 billion transactions per day, analysing each one in real time so it should (hopefully) catch someone who’s using your card fraudulently before they’ve actually bought anything. You’ll probably never know that Z13 is taking care of your purchases — but it might just save you some stalled transactions. [IBM]