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IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

newsroom.ibm.com

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Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#41

Post by roncesvalles »

mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and write a robust distributed system on top instead of the other way around.

There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software. That's what a mainframe is. You can write a simple and easy to maintain single process backend program, run it on a mainframe and be fairly confident that it can run without stopping for decades. Everything from the power supply to the CPU is redundant and can be hot swapped without booting the OS. Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example (just think about how insanely reliable credit card transactions are).

IBM has a monopoly in the second world. You could say the entire field of distributed systems is one big indie effort to break free of IBM's monopoly on computing.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#42

Post by woadwarrior01 »

VorpalWay wrote: post #7
mafzal9 wrote: post #6

Arm is trying to expend it's horizons every where as in the previous year ARM acquired the Arduino.

No, it was Qualcomm who acquired Arduino. While they are an ARM licensee who make ARM chips, they are not ARM.

Also, Qualcomm and ARM aren't quite in good terms.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/09/qualcomm-achi...

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#43

Post by itake »

mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

I own their shares due to their Quantum Computing group

You can see their roadmap here:

https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#44

Post by rzerowan »

silvestrov wrote: post #26
rzerowan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im thinking maybe as a compliment to x86 offerings and eventual displacement as a primary offering , i do not see them ditching POWER. The architecture might be non-standard and not very widespread however for what it does and workloads that are suited to it. I dont think any ARM design comes close , maybe Fujitsu's A64FX.

Marketingwise I think it is difficult for IBM to sell x86 systems as it is too easy for customers to compare performance to a standard Wintel server. Sun had the same problem after 2001 dotcom when standard PC servers became reliable enough to run web servers on. It's easier to sell "our special sauce" when building using a custom ARM platform. Then you have no easy comparison with standard servers.

Yep i think thats why even POWER isnt sold standalone but as part of the Z/i series packages as a unit.

They will probably market the ARM inclusion similarly - as something that the package provides.

As far as POWER i think only Raptor[1] does direct marketingof the power(hehe) and capabilities

[1]https://www.raptorcs.com/

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#45

Post by lotsofpulp »

Frieren wrote: post #18
mykowebhn wrote: post #13

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies. IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.

Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about.

IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM.

Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#47

Post by trebligdivad »

mcbridematt wrote: post #11

Ah, that explains this patchset that was submitted to the Linux kernel today "KVM: s390: Introduce arm64 KVM" "By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform's software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390....." https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-k…

Oh that's a weird way to do it; they used to have an x86 add on block for mainframes which was just a pile of x86 blades with some integration.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#49

Post by graemep »

iSnow wrote: post #46

It is wild how ARM - which was kind of a niche company and ISA - has taken the world by storm since the modern smartphone was born. Now their designs make their way upwards to big iron and AI datacenters.

Smartphones were a big boost, but they were already growing very rapidly before that.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#50

Post by shrimppersimmon »

eru wrote: post #38
shrimppersimmon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER. Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications. They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.

Power was used in customer applications a long time ago? I think Apple used them for a while and so did some game consoles?

Yes. Apple used PowerPC, and PowerPC was also in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Wii U. It was also widespread in embedded sectors like networking, automotive, and aerospace.

IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.

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