PowerPC Archives - IT Jungle

IBM Takes On The Memory Crunch With New FlashSystem Lineup

February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a shortage of main memory and flash in the world right now. This is due, in large part, to the explosion in investments in yottascale AI systems that burn tens of gigawatts of juice. Such systems require a huge amount of HBM stacked memory on their GPU and XPU accelerators as well as high performance DRAM and flash in their hosts and truly enormous shared flash storage to serve up datasets.

The biggest companies buy up most of the DRAM and flash chips a year or more before they are even made, but with demand skyrocketing, the memory …
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IBM Pushes FlashSystem Costs Down To Nearline Disk Storage

March 3, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If flash storage is ever going to replace disk storage, and there are good reasons to believe that at some point it will, this will happen because flash becomes normal and offers a mix of technical and economic reasons why it is worth a small premium – not a huge one, mind you – compared to buy dirt cheap spinning rust.

IBM’s new FlashSystem C200, which debuted last week in announcement letter AD25-0017, might be just the thing that small and medium Power Systems customers have been waiting for.

It has been a dozen years since IBM bought flash …
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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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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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The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the central tenets of our philosophy here at The Four Hundred is: Anything that makes Power Systems stronger helps IBM i last longer.

For as long as we have been watching the AS/400 and IBM i market, big iron has driven a lot of revenue for machines based on IBM’s proprietary CISC processors and then PowerPC and Power RISC processors. And the big iron machines drove even more of the profits from these products. Big iron is, therefore, important. But just how much money are we talking about?

A lot more than you probably think, as it …
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In The IBM i Trenches With: Computer Plus

March 29, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Welcome to a new series in The Four Hundred called In The IBM i Trenches.

We spend a lot of time talking to people at IBM and at the key suppliers of systems software, application software, and development tools for the IBM i platform. But the ecosystem is a lot bigger than these players. There are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, depending. There are suppliers of third party maintenance as well as technical support and all kinds of programming and system management services. And there are an increasing number of hosting …
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Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …
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IBM Takes On The Memory Crunch With New FlashSystem Lineup

IBM Pushes FlashSystem Costs Down To Nearline Disk Storage

The Plus Things Change, The Plus Things Stay The Same

The Pivotal Year Ahead For Big Blue And IBM i Shops

The Big Iron Customers That The Power E1080 Is Aimed At

In The IBM i Trenches With: Computer Plus

Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

Content archive

Recent Posts

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