• 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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• The Power10 Machines That Will Take IBM i To 2025

  July 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM i shops that have been waiting for an upgrade path that will take them to the other half of this decade do not have to wait any longer. Finally, after a change of foundry (to Samsung) and process technology (from 10 nanometers down to 7 nanometers) as well as a new implementation of the Power instruction set packed with all kinds of vector and matrix math goodies that are perfect for embedding AI into commercial applications, Big Blue is ready to start shipping the entry and midrange Power Systems machines based on the Power10 processor.

  We made it, despite …

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• The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When we look back on it many years from now, this year, 2022, will be a pivotal year in the history of the Power Systems platform from Big Blue, which was commercially significant starting in February 1990 when the RS/6000 was launched but which obviously traces its roots through the IBM i and OS/400 branches of the Power Systems family tree all the way back to the System/3 launched in July 1969 just 10 days after humans first landed on the moon.

  There are different kinds of pivot points in the history of the IBM midrange platforms, including the launch …

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• IBM And Samsung Go Vertical To Push Transistor Density On Chips

  January 10, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue might have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip fabrication operation to GlobalFoundries many years ago, but that does not mean that the company does not still do a reasonably large amount of fundamental research into chip maker techniques and tricks. Transistor, chip, and packaging research and development is a big portion of the patent portfolio at IBM and continues to be so because Big Blue still has some of the smartest chipheads on the planet working for it because IBM wants to ensure there is a roadmap for future Power and System z processors and because it can …

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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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• Talk Is Cheap, Action Is Costly

  February 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies pick the platforms for their mission critical systems so they can run them for decades. And it is a very, very big deal when they decide to change those platforms. And, furthermore, it is a hell of a lot harder to change these platforms than many people think, and that is because most of the value of those platforms is locked up in the applications and databases that run atop the servers, operating systems, and middleware.

  It is with this in mind that we always take any survey data that asks IT executives if and when they are going …

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• To 2032 . . . And Beyond!

  December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As you sit here in 2020, can you even imagine 2032? Can you imagine beyond that? Oddly enough, I can imagine three or four decades out from here a lot more easily than I can do a dozen years, even though I know the error bars get longer and the probabilistic clouds get fuzzier the further into the future you wander with your mind. So what does it mean, really, when Big Blue commits to support the IBM i platform at least until 2032, a mere dozen years away in a platform that, depending on how you want to …

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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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• Max Thread Room

  September 28, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For a lot of organizations that buy servers and create systems out of them, the overall throughput of each single machine is the most important performance metric they care about. But for a lot of IBM i shops and indeed even System z mainframe shops, the performance of a single core is the most important metric because most IBM i customers do not have very many cores at all. Some have only one, others have two, three, or four, and most do not have more than that although there are some very large Power Systems running IBM i. But that …

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