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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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After Seven Quarters Of Growth, Power Systems Declines

October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The tough compares have hit home on IBM’s Power Systems business, but the good news is that this has happened after seven consecutive quarters of growth for the Power-based server business that Big Blue owns lock, stock, and barrel. Even with this decline, which was quite steep because of the triple whammy of tough compares (more on that in a moment), there is still a healthy underlying Power Systems business that is much better off than the last time it was hit by similar declines.

Let’s take a look at the numbers for IBM’s Power Systems division and then work …
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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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IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …
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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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The Path Truly Opens To Alternate Power CPUs, But Is It Enough?

What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

After Seven Quarters Of Growth, Power Systems Declines

What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

Content archive

Recent Posts

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