• IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

  August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

  This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …

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• Chasing AI Inference, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, the Power AC922 is one of the best platforms for running HPC simulation and modeling workloads or machine learning training workloads, as is attested by the adoption of this platform for two pre-exascale systems at the U.S. Department of Energy dubbed “Summit” and “Sierra” by their respective Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory homes.

  As you know from our past coverage of this platform, the Power AC922 gets the bulk of its compute capacity from the Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators embedded in the system, which can have four or six of the “Volta” V100 GPU …

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• Entry Server Bang For The Buck, IBM i Versus Windows Server

  November 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Some big changes that Microsoft has instituted with its Windows Server platform to make pricing consistent across on premises and public cloud deployments has had the interesting side effect that entry IBM i machinery based on Power9 iron is now more competitive with entry X86 servers using the latest processors from Intel and AMD.

  This is not universally true, mind you, but it is certainly true of machinery in the P05 software tier where a lot of the IBM i base hangs out. There is still a large gap on entry iron in the P10 software tier, and we did …

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• Setting The Stage For The Next Decade Of Processing

  August 12, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is no secret that Moore’s Law is causing all kinds of grief with chip designers working in all parts of the IT stack. It was bad enough to run out of clock scaling when Dennard Scaling stopped, and the industry has done a great job in making processors more parallel and allowing for them to offload processing to various kinds of accelerators, either on the die, in the package, or in the chassis over high speed interconnects. But even this is running out of gas as processors keep pushing up against the reticle limits of lithography machines because the …

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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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• Systems A Bright Spot In Mixed Results For IBM

  October 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to describe a company that raked in $18.76 billion in revenues and brought $2.69 billion of that to the bottom as limping along. But watching IBM, as revenues declined by 2.1 percent, after many years of gentle declines, and profits off by 1.3 percent, it sure does feel that way sometimes.

  In past years, as Big Blue crested above $100 billion in sales, its growth was limited by its total addressable market among large enterprises that can only get so large, too, as well as by the limits of its imagination for peddling wares to small and …

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• Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

  October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.

  Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.

  Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …

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• The Herculean Task Of Applying Spectre/Meltdown Patches

  October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities are, as our resident chief technology officer and author of the weekly IBM i PTF Guide, Doug Bidwell, is fond of saying, the gift that just keeps on giving.

  We had the shock of finding out in January that there were vulnerabilities in all processor architectures that use speculative execution in their instruction chewing engines – that means all existing processors, by the way. There are none that do not use this very useful architectural feature. And then we had the wait to see what the industry would do to patch these …

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• Happy Days Are Here Again For Systems

  June 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A combination of increases in memory and CPU prices, beefier configurations often with GPU or FPGA accelerators, and outright ebullient demand for compute capacity is making the server business look like it is exploding when it is merely expanding at a more-than-healthy clip.

  In the first quarter, according to the box counters at IDC, server revenues were up an astounding 38.6 percent to $18.82 billion, the kind of number we have never seen in the history of the server racket. Server shipments – and it is getting hard to count the nodes sometimes – rose by 20.7 percent to just …

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• Inside IBM’s SAP HANA On Power Playbook

  May 21, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems line is in transition right now, making the jump from Power8 to Power9 processors, and yet the company wants to continue selling applications without having customers wait for the newer chip to be available across the entire Power Systems portfolio. This is a particular problem when it comes to the HANA in-memory database on Power Systems, which IBM is eager to sell given the higher memory capacity and bandwidth that Power9 offers compared to the Xeon processors from Intel.

  To help business partners that are peddling SAP suites on Power, which includes the IBM i platform, in …

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