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Will Power Chips Get A Converged Arm Instruction Set Like Z Mainframe CPUs?

August 31, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One a decade for the past six decades, Big Blue launches an effort to converge its diverse system architectures. It almost never works, with the exception of the launch of the System/360 mainframes in April 1964 and the AS/400 minicomputers in June 1988. And to be fair, the AS/400 was itself based in part on technologies created in a failed convergence effort.

Back in 1986, the “Fort Knox” project sought to converge the System/4300 air-cooled, entry mainframe lines with the System/38 (from 1978) and the System/36 (from 1983), and it failed. But in the failure, the Rochester Labs took some …
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Big Blue Is Still Talking About Future Power Processors, Which Is Good

May 18, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The details are really thin, as usual, but IBM is still talking about the advantages that the Power10 and Power11 processors have over other server-class CPUs in the market today, as Power chief architect Bill Starke did at the most recent POWERUp conference in New Orleans. And Starke always ends his presentations with a hint or two about what Power Next or Power Future – what we would call Power12 – might look like.

Many of the things that Starke talked about during his two presentations at POWERUp 2026 are things that we have been talking about with Starke for …
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Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It may be hard to believe, but with the launch of IBM i 7.6 today, it has been 13,440 days since OS/400 V1R1 was announced on June 21, 1988, and Big Blue has delivered 27 distinct releases of the OS/400 and IBM i platform with dozens of Technology Refresh interim updates between releases in the IBM i 7.X series.

It took nearly three years to go from OS/400 V1R1 to OS/400 V2R1, and there were no interim releases and Technology Refreshes were not going to be invented for a long time. With the V2 series, hardware and software releases in …
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An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023

April 26, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

After so many years of not normal, it is comforting to do something to feel normal, like travel to what used to be the COMMON spring user conference and what is now called POWERUp, and in particular POWERUp 2023. (I am only using the official capitalization there because Jenny will change it during edit if I don’t.) I don’t want to leave the hill I live on, especially after so many years of traveling many times a month, but I must say that I enjoyed myself and had my share of boisterous conversations, beer, and food.

And work, of course. …
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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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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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Will Power Chips Get A Converged Arm Instruction Set Like Z Mainframe CPUs?

Big Blue Is Still Talking About Future Power Processors, Which Is Good

Plotting Out Power Systems And IBM i To 2040 And Beyond

An Update On Power From POWERUp 2023

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

IBM And Samsung Go Vertical To Push Transistor Density On Chips

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