OpenPower Archives

The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like nearly all of you, I have never read the autobiographical romance novels of Jean-Baptise Alphonse Karr, or read back issues of the satirical Le Figaro newspaper that were nearly two centuries old when Karr was editor of that paper, which is today aimed at the upper middle class and which is still one of the papers of record for France.

But like nearly all of you, I am very familiar with one of the witticisms that came out of Karr’s pen: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Which translates into American as something akin to: …
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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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Taking The Full Measure Of Power Servers

January 25, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Imagine, for a moment, that there was not a drive by the Chinese government to have more of its state-owned enterprises, which are among the largest companies in the country, adopt homegrown IT gear for their data processing needs, an effort that started in 2015 but really built up steam two years later when a trade war erupted between the United States and China. Imagine that trade war didn’t happen, either.

What, pray tell, would have happened to IBM’s Power Systems business over the past several years? Our best guess is plenty. At the very least, perhaps the Power Systems …
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The Path Truly Opens To Alternate Power CPUs, But Is It Enough?

July 14, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you have a few tens of millions of dollars to spare and you want to set up a foundry partnership with either Globalfoundries for 14 nanometer chip making technologies or with Samsung for 7 nanometer technologies and then create your own Power processor, things just got a little bit easier. Big Blue has open sourced one of its Power cores through the OpenPower foundation and now anybody and everybody can grab it and design a new central processing unit around that core.

Don’t get too excited, but get a little excited. Let me explain.

We still believe in the …
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What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.

Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …
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IBM Patches Privilege Escalation Flaw In Db2 Mirror

September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

Much of the Western World may take August off, but apparently not hackers and other off-book computer enthusiasts, as IBM addressed several security problems across its IBM i software family last month. The list of security flaws include a privilege escalation flaw in Db2 Mirror and OpenSSL and BIND vulnerabilities in IBM i itself. Power Systems firmware and Sterling data integration products also saw patches.

The lowlight of the month’s security news arguably goes to Db2 Mirror, the new database clustering technology that IBM released in June with the delivery of IBM i 7.4. The software is designed to provide …
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What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

August 26, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Due to a conflict with a prior engagement at the Hot Chips conference, where IBM unveiled some of the aspects of the impending Power9′ processor that will prototype some ideas about memory subsystems that will appear in the future Power10 chips, we were not able to attend the OpenPower Foundation’s developer summit in San Diego last week. But IBM kept us in the loop, and we were intrigued to learn that Big Blue was open sourcing the instruction set architecture, or ISA, of the Power processors.

This step is perhaps an inevitable one, given Big Blue’s desire to make the …
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Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?

These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …
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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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