Today, they compete with mainframes in terms of architecture, sophistication, and performance, and in some ways clearly surpass them such as cost, accessibility, space, and power consumption. Little more than 10 years later, the 80486 microprocessor chip surpassed the VAX speed. These developments suggest that today's microcomputers are equivalent to the mainframe power-houses of 10 years ago and the supercomputers of 20 years ago, yet at a fraction of the size and cost. A big difference, though, lies in the server operating system, which is tailored to on-line, rather than batch, processing. Another big difference is that the server is much more restricted than the mainframe in the number or attached users that it can support, primarily due to the simplicity in processing capacity of the server.
Most mainframes are also much more powerful than most servers.
The new mainframe is playing rolls as a central repository source, as a data manager, and is providing security. For critical applications, these mainframes have been providing piece of mind and archive data from servers which have little fault tolerance features and that lack strong backup capability. They are also acting as database servers for large enterprises which need global information. Accordingly, mainframe operating and control systems are evolving to support user-friendly interfaces and applications, while retaining the capability of supporting legacy functionalities. With the current trend leaning toward distributed computing, superservers have bright future.