The processors and interconnects may be faster, but that's not the whole story. The X-15 was fast, but you wouldn't use it to deliver FedEx packages. Or shipping containers.
x86s are fast and, if your problems allow that, you can gang a bunch of them to crunch your workload faster and cheaper than any mainframe could, but that does not make these machines even a little bit less impressive than they appear.
That's just absurd. Are we really that dense to compare interconnected x86s to shared memory parallel mainframes? Not even Myrinet or SCI (and the various other contenders of the throne) could be half as effective as point-to-point processor interconnects, and that's an overstatement.
To make such a comparison without understanding the workloads these mainframes are "crunching" is not very wise.
edit: Wow. Must've hit a nerve, I guess. Downmod me to oblivion, sir!
No way I would downmod you - that's exactly what I was saying. You may put certain workloads on racks of Dell servers, but there are workloads that are best served by these kinds of machines (SGI has some shared-memory monsters too, with x86 processors) and I say these IBM machines are impressive works of art.
But I am biased. I even love the 3278 font with those sleek 6's and 9's.
Well, actually it DOES make them less impressive... because once you look, actually look objectively, at how x86 continues to close the gap, you realize that the day is coming when mainframes will go away or be otherwise not distinguishable.
Look: when the 486 came out circa 1989, its memory bandwidth to RAM was about 70MB/second. That was the speed of a single disk channel for an IBM mainframe, a huge difference in performance specs.
Interconnects? NUMA? Heck the 486 wasn't even good for 2-way SMP - while the mainframe could be hooked up into a clustered sysplex (1994, or the earlier virtual coupling facility) and even mirrored over long distance links (GDPS).
Look at the way these differences have been minimized in recent times ... the mainframe chip borrows its GX IO chip from POWER, fer cryin' out loud...
Your logic is flawed. The impressiveness of current and near-future x86 processors (and they are, considering they are still compatible with 8088's, quite impressive) has no relation to how impressive the x196 and its support chips are.
To use my previous analogy, the X-15 or the SR-71 are impressive machines, but that doesn't make a 8,000 TEU freighter, or an aircraft carrier, less impressive.
The differences in basic technology are being reduced, but all it does is to make the current crop of x86s look less crippled compared to POWER and zCPUs. And, mind you, POWER makes a top-of-the-line x86 look like a toy.
x86s are fast and, if your problems allow that, you can gang a bunch of them to crunch your workload faster and cheaper than any mainframe could, but that does not make these machines even a little bit less impressive than they appear.