DDR4 Archives - IT Jungle

IBM Is Running Out Of DDR4 Memory Faster Than It Thought

September 25, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in August, we told you about how Big Blue was shifting away from the DDR4 main memory chips and towards DDR5 main memory chips for Power10 systems, which were designed expressly to support both types of memory.

This is just like Power8 servers were designed to support both DDR3 and DDR4 memory, with the latter coming halfway through the Power8 product cycle. The Power9 machines used DDR4 memory solely, and the Power10 is getting support for DDR5 a little late in its cycle, given that we expect Power11 servers next year. Presumably the Power11 servers will just support DDR5 …
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Inflation Finally Comes To IBM i Platform Prices

April 18, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the inflation rates rising around the world, and particularly strongly in the United States, it was bound to happen sooner or later: IBM is raising prices on key software for Power Systems machines as well as on selected Power9 hardware.

With entry and midrange machines based on Power10 iron just around the corner – probably announced in May around the COMMON POWERUp 2022 conference in New Orleans from May 23 through 26 and shipping sometime in June – it might seem like a weird time to be raising Power9 hardware prices. But there could be a logic to it. …
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For The Prices They Are A-Changin’

October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.

Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …
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Why POWER8 Is Sometimes The Best Platform To Run SAP HANA

November 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a truth in this world that you get what you pay for, and it is absolutely true for the systems that companies buy to support SAP’s HANA in-memory database and their applications for data warehousing and online transaction processing.

It is no secret to the Power Systems faithful that IBM’s Power architecture has consistently offered reliability, availability, and serviceability features in both the processor and the system architecture that are superior to X86 alternatives. And the Power Systems platform also offers superior compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth benefits on top of that, which absolutely justifies the …
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IBM Tweaks Prices Up And Down On Memory And Storage

February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue usually tells customers about price changes on Power Systems hardware and related software, but we have not seen any such price changes in a long time. As it turns out, IBM is telling business partners through their normal announcement channels about any tweaks to price changes, but these are not showing up in the customer feeds that we have subscribed to for three decades.

This could be deliberate, or accidental. We have no idea, and honestly, it would take too long to ask. But now we know, and an intrepid reseller made us aware of a recent price …
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I Dare You To Keep Track Of Power Systems Memory Prices

November 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about IBM is that, thanks to a series of antitrust lawsuits that it settled with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division – after much, much legal grief and heaven only knows how much expense – back in the 1960s and 1980s, the company has created systems that tell customers about its products, how they change an evolve, and what they cost at any given time.

All vendors should be required by law to publish list prices, because they provide a ceiling to the negotiations. A point above which you know a vendor is not …
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IBM Readies Big Iron With “Cumulus” Power9 Chips

July 30, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power Systems lineup has been updated top to bottom on single-socket and dual-socket machinery based on the “Nimbus” variants of the Power9 chip, which sport up to 24 cores per die and have up to four threads per core. These Nimbus chips are used in all kinds of machines, including those that can run IBM i, either alongside AIX or Linux using the PowerVM hypervisor or in what is made to look like a bare metal IBM i setup but which is really a PowerVM machine with one partition. (Shhhhh.) The Nimbus processors are also deployed in …
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The Deal On Power9 Memory For Entry Servers

March 5, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of changes that come with any new Power Systems platform. But perhaps the biggest change – and one that will in some ways make the Power9 platform more competitive with X86 and ARM servers and in others less competitive – is the way IBM is shifting from buffered DDR3 and DDR4 main memory used in Power8 iron to plain vanilla registered DDR4 memory that is commonly used in all servers these days.

Buffered memory had its heyday on high-end NUMA systems, and was necessary to try to balance the needs of memory bandwidth against ever-increasing compute …
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IBM Deal Prices Current Power8 Compute Like Future Power9

November 6, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The old proverb, “Ask, and ye shall receive,” is thankfully and just a little bit humorously applicable. In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, there was a certain amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth about the fact that IBM is not shipping shiny new Power9 machines here in the fourth quarter and will not until early 2018. Given that fact and that the Power8’s are very long in the tooth, we fully expect for Big Blue to cut IBM i customers some kind of deal. There is a small deal for those buying Linux-only versions of the …
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Power9 Big Iron “Fleetwood/Mack” Rumors

October 9, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes, the universe just hands you a great title, like that one above. As the Power9 platform is rolling out across the field to various launch pads, with entry, midrange, and high-end systems in the works, word always inevitably leaks out about what Big Blue has planned with its future systems.

In the case of the high-end machines, we are hearing rumors that the current top-end Power E880 and its half-pint Power E870, which went by the code-name “Brazos” within IBM, likely in deference to the river in New Mexico, will be replaced by a machine code-named “Fleetwood,” no doubt …
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