Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Preserves Memory Investments Across Power10 And Power11
May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While the central processing unit inside every server gets all of the glory and much of the budget, these days it is the main memory that stores the data and gives that CPU memory that is perhaps more important and is actually the most costly part of the overall system.
This is particularly true of back office systems running relational databases, and increasingly these days, in-memory databases to speed up access to that corporate data. If you spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on system memory, wouldn’t it be nice if that investment could be amortized over more …
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Picking Apart IBM’s $150 Billion In US Manufacturing And R&D
May 21, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Several weeks ago, we read with great interest, considering the great desire by President Donald Trump to foment a new wave of indigenous manufacturing in the United States with extreme import tariffs, that Big Blue was committing to “to invest $150 billion in America over the next five years to fuel the economy and to accelerate its role as the global leader in computing.”
This announcement was not one, as far as we know, brokered between Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chairman, president, and chief executive officer, and Trump, which is not necessarily smart. It is perhaps best to let this commander …
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Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?
May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.
The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …
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Is IBM Going To Raise Prices On Power10 Expert Care?
May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have a feeling that Big Blue let the cat out of the bag a little early on a price increase for its Power Expert Care technical support services for the Power10 platform. We have this feeling because IBM on May 1 canceled a price increase in the Americas region in announcement letter AD25-1009 and in the Japan region in announcement letter AD25-1048.
This is weird, and we are showing you the Americas announcement below in case IBM takes it down:
First of all, the letter number referenced for May 1 does not match the actual letter number, which …
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Another Non-TR “Technology Refresh” Happens With IBM i TR6
May 5, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As you know, Big Blue released IBM i 7.6 and IBM i 7.5 Technology Refresh 6 (TR6) on April 8, with the expectation that both would ship to customers on April 18. IBM i 7.6 was detailed in announcement letter AD25-0031 and IBM i 7.5 TR6 was revealed in announcement letter AD25-0077. We’re all good there. And many of the features in IBM i 7.6 were backcast as a refresh into IBM i 7.5 with TR6, if you read the announcement letters.
IBM i 7.6 was available on April 18 as expected, but we know a bunch of people …
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Will The Turbulent Economy Downdraft IBM Systems Or Lift It?
April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have always contended that recessions accelerate technology trends rather than slow them down. And if we start heading into a recession either in the United States or around the globe – it is hard to imagine one without the other – it is reasonable to assume that companies will be looking very aggressively to take automation up another level to cut costs further, to generate new lines of business, and to push profits as hard as they can in what will probably be a deflationary environment.
There are a lot of assumptions in that paragraph, so let’s pick it …
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50 Acres And A Humanoid Robot With An AI Avatar
April 28, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We have made a joke for over the past year that sometime in the not-too-distant future, when we are born, we will be issued three things: Some kind of unique identifier such as a Social Security number in the United States, a software-based collection of AI agents to teach us and to do self-driven education about the world, and a humanoid robot that can embody that collection of AI agents – one might call it a Purson – to keep us safe as we grow.
This would at least level the AI playing field to a certain extent.
All jokes …
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Sundry Interesting IBM i Announcements For You To Ponder
April 23, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We are still picking though the latest tweaks and changes to the IBM i platform that came with the April 8 announcements. We are still also working through our disappointment that there was not one single interesting hardware announcement from Big Blue relating to the Power Systems platform. We are having a bit of iron deficiency, it seems.
First thing first, we noticed this week that the official Redbook for IBM i 7.6, which naturally enough is called IBM i 7.6 Features And Functions, has been published, and is jam packed with 215 pages of more details about …
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z17 Mainframes Give IBM Time To Ramp AI-Accelerated Power11 Systems
April 14, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
We had been expecting for the Power11 processors and their new Power Systems servers to be announced sometime around the spring to early summer of this year and to start shipping in volume in the summer, maybe in June or July, with a nice sales bump in the second half of 2025. However, now the Power11 launch will be in the second half of the year, and IBM’s Systems group will be counting on a bump first from the System z17 mainframes that were launched last week.
This has happened before, and more than once, and it is a good …
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Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond
April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.
It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …
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