GlobalFoundries Archives

IBM Raises The Curtain A Little On Future Power Processors

November 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We commented back in August when the Hot Chips 2024 conference was underway at Stanford University that it was odd that IBM did reveal some of the speeds and feeds of the Power11 processor that we all know is coming in 2025. And when the TechXchange 2024 partner event was held in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we were pretty sure that IBM was working on some sort of accelerated system for GenAI applications and a week later we remembered that the obvious pairing was a Power System host with scads of IBM’s own “Spyre” AI accelerators running …
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It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry

October 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.

And so, back in 2014, IBM …
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Awaiting The Power10 Rollout And The New Sales Cycle

July 26, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is difficult to be patient but before too long IBM will begin shipping Power10-based systems and the product line, which has been bumping along at the tail end of the Power9 cycle, will start growing again. With IBM having a new microarchitecture as well as a new foundry partner, Samsung Electronics, which is making its very first server chip with the Power10 and implementing its first large-scale chip with a 7 nanometer process, the stakes are high and IBM is being a little extra cautious in getting the Power10 chip out the door.

Enterprise customers are risk averse, and …
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IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, IBM took its former foundry partner, GlobalFoundries, to court in a lawsuit that alleges, in essence, that the company promised to deliver Power9 processors based on 14 nanometer technologies and Power10 processors based on 10 nanometer technologies and had some issues with the former and never delivered on the latter.

Not only that, IBM’s lawsuit says that it never released GlobalFoundries from its from its promise to deliver a 10 nanometer chip, and when the company promised to shift to 7 nanometer technologies, IBM in good faith worked on developing Power10 chips for these processes and spent at …
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IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors

May 17, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue may be a lot smaller than it used to be, and it is going to get a lot smaller after its spins off its managed services and hosting business into a new company to be called Kyndryl, which will have about $19 billion in sales, about 4,600 customers, and about 90,000 employees. That will leave the remaining part of IBM, focused on its Power Systems and System z platforms and its whole push into hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.

That remaining business will have about $59 billion in sales, about 260,000 employees, and something on the …
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IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …
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Power To The Tenth Power

August 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

This is one of my favorite times of the year, with the Hot Chips symposium usually underway this week at Stanford University and all the vendors big and small trotting out their, well, hottest chippery. In this case, hot means “extremely interesting” but it often means “burning shedloads of watts” as well. But this is the time that the chip architects show off what they have been working on for four or five years and what has already been in production in recent months or will be in the coming months.

IBM tends to jump the gun a bit …
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IBM Raises The Curtain A Little On Future Power Processors

It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry

Awaiting The Power10 Rollout And The New Sales Cycle

IBM Versus GlobalFoundries: A Lawsuit Instead Of The Power Chips Planned

IBM: The Elder Statesman Of Semiconductors

IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

Power To The Tenth Power

Content archive

Recent Posts

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Search