Power6 Will Not Have Mainframe Support--Maybe

Published: April 4, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you like a good riddle and lots of speculation, you probably like talking about politics, or the entertainment industry, or the future processors from chip makers. In all three cases, there is a lot more known than anyone is willing to talk about, a lot of misinterpretation and misinformation, and a lot of excitement over what will be popular and what will become yesterday's news. IBM has been gradually revealing more details about its future Power6 processors. One of them seemed to be that mainframe support will not be in it.

Frank Soltis, the chief architect of the former System/38, AS/400, and iSeries server lines who also has a hand in the design of the current and future System i kickers to those machines, gave a presentation at the COMMON midrange user group in Minneapolis, Minnesota, last week, just a few hours up the road from the Rochester labs where the 64-bit PowerPC and Power4 processors were designed and where IBM makes its entry and midrange iSeries and pSeries servers, now called the System i and System p. Soltis is also a professor at the University of Minnesota's computer science and electrical engineering department, where he teaches graduate courses in processor design. He may not be as famous as Ken Olsen or Michael Dell, but his work on virtualized systems design has had a profound impact on Big Blue and made the company untold billions of dollars. He is the closest thing to Steve Jobs that the community of 200,000 or so OS/400 user companies have to a visionary like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. He also likes to talk, and often gets himself into hot water with IBM's press relations people, who are always trying to muzzle him.

Soltis spent a fair amount of time poking fun at Itanium, a frequent target for IBMers, and didn't really say anything unusual except to concede that it was a conceptually interesting design that was not compatible with the existing Pentium and Xeon processors and therefore doomed. That is a radical simplification of what is going on in the Itanium market, and quite frankly, while no one would call Itanium a huge success and certainly not a volume product, Itanium has built up some momentum. And while various Power processors are being used in game machines, set top boxes, car electronics, servers, and even some desktops and laptops (at least for a short while longer), the fact is the Power4, Power5, and future Power6 chips are relegated to the server market, where their volumes are on the same order of magnitude as Itanium. Power, as a family, does better than Itanium, in terms of ecosystem and sales. But the Power6 chip may do no better than the future "Montecito" and "Montvale" dual-core Itaniums in terms of revenues and profits.

Soltis also poked fun at the non-announcement of the IBM Systems Agenda last summer, and bashed the press for not covering it (the press is a convenient punching bag). The Systems Agenda is IBM's five-year plan for its server line from here to 2010, which IBM did not really publicize very effectively. This seemed to be the point Soltis was trying to make, but he is such a smart alec sometimes that you cannot really be sure.

He also said that the press took some of his comments and misrepresented what he said about the convergence in the IBM server line, and drew the conclusion that IBM was converging its Power and mainframe processor architectures. "A lot of people misunderstood and were saying that the mainframe is going to the Power processor," he explained. "No, it is not." There has been much speculation, particularly since the exposure of the so-called Project ECLipz, an IBM project that was launched in 2001 supposedly to converge the iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries product lines. The two prior families use Power processors, while the latter use mainframe-style processors.

An awful lot of people expect the Power6 machines to be able to support mainframe workloads. IBM has not confirmed or denied this in any official manner, and Soltis' vague comments on it have to be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, just because Power6 doesn't support mainframe workloads natively doesn't mean that they can't be emulated using software. One such tool already exists: QuickTransit from Transitive. This software was used by Silicon Graphics to run Irix-MIPS applications written for its vintage Origin servers and workstations in emulation mode on its Linux-Itanium Altix supercomputers. Apple is also using a variant of QuickTransit to create the "Rosetta" environment, which allows Mac OS applications written for Power-based processors to run on its new Intel 64-bit Core Solo and Core Duo processors. And just because the Power6 processor doesn't support native mainframe instructions doesn't mean that future Power7 chips won't. For instance, it is not hard to imagine IBM creating a hybrid Power-mainframe processor complex and porting over some functions--TCP/IP, database acceleration, and I/O processing--to non-mainframe processors and throwing in a mainframe-style core into the mix. This way, IBM could design one processor, perhaps with several Power cores and one mainframe core, and just make this one design rather than two separate designs.

And, Soltis didn't say anything about Power7 or Power8, either. For all we know, the rumors are right, they just have the wrong Power chip generation.

See how vague statements only lead to more speculation? And IT vendors know this. But they just can't stop being vague because they like the sport of telling people they guessed wrong and the anticipation it builds for a future product. And, the IT analyst and press communities and some of the IT shops that end up buying this gear all like the speculation, too--no doubt about that.

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