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Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter

December 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here at The Four Hundred, we have a saying: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger makes IBM i last longer. And part of making IBM i stronger, oddly enough, means just getting behind the idea of diversity of compute in the datacenter and that specifically means countering the notion that the X86 processor (and specifically the Intel Xeon SP implementation of it, but not exclusively because we now have AMD Epyc processors that are viable) is necessarily the only processor in the future of the datacenter.

We have always held this opinion, as you well know, and have …
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IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been following the development of the Power10 processor with great interest over the past few years, and have been trying to figure out precisely when – and how – Big Blue will put its future processor inside of Power Systems machines. At the Common Europe Online vCEC 2020 event last week, Steve Sibley, vice president and offering manager for the Cognitive Systems division at IBM, talked about IBM’s plan and put some rough dates on it.

When we talked to Sibley back in May, all he could tell us was that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic …
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Powers Of Ten

May 11, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The one thing that is easy to predict about designing and manufacturing a server processor is that no matter who is doing it, no matter what process in what decade, it is always hard and things always run late. Whether or not we on the outside world can see this, it remains true just the same. And that is because in any given era, with any given chip etching technique or chip architecture, server processors are always pushing up to the very limits of what is possible. And things go wrong.

This is why it is a good idea to …
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IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

January 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last summer, GlobalFoundries, the chip making conglomerate comprised of the foundry businesses of AMD and IBM plus Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, put the kibosh on its planned aggressive ramp of 7 nanometer chip making technologies. AMD and IBM, who both depended on GlobalFoundries for their server chip manufacturing, obviously knew well before this announcement that GlobalFoundries was going to be halting development and production ramp for 7 nanometers, so they were not left in as much of a lurch as it might seem.

Lucky for both companies, there is more than one foundry that was trying to stay on the bleeding …
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Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.

Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.

Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …
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The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are, as our resident chief technology officer and author of the weekly IBM i PTF Guide, Doug Bidwell, is fond of saying, the gift that just keeps on giving.

We had the shock of finding out in January that there were vulnerabilities in all processor architectures that use speculative execution in their instruction chewing engines – that means all existing processors, by the way. There are none that do not use this very useful architectural feature. And then we had the wait to see what the industry would do to patch these …
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The Power Neine Conundrum

July 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you take a very liberal interpretation of what the term cognitive systems means, including database, middleware, analytics software and the underlying system hardware and software, then IBM has spent untold tens of billions of dollars – probably hundreds of billions, really – creating its Cognitive Systems stack. We wonder what all of that analytics and machine learning software would say, with Watson’s voice of course, if it was pointed at IBM’s entire financial and technical history.

What is the prognosis, Doctor Watson?

We here at IT Jungle are an optimistic lot, and we realize that IBM, like many of …
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Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter

IBM Reveals Power10 Rollout Plan, Begins Power11

Powers Of Ten

IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches

The Power Neine Conundrum

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search