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IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

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Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#71

Post by mbreese »

formerly_proven wrote: post #68
silvestrov wrote: post #5

> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security I think we can ignore the "AI" word here as its presence is only because everything currently has to be AI. So why would IBM add ARM? > As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run…

IBM has two architectures which are de-facto only used by them, s390x and ppc64le. They have poured a lot of resources into having open source software support those targets, and this announcement might mean they find it easier/cheaper going forward to virtualize ARM instead and maybe even migrate slowly to ARM.

I think they see customers wanting to have the flexibility to move to ARM and this is the fastest way to say they support ARM workloads. Maybe this is a path for IBM to eventually use ARM chips down the road, but I see this as being more about meeting customers where they think the demand is today rather than an explicit guess for tomorrow.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#72

Post by mbreese »

tempay wrote: post #8
silvestrov wrote: post #5

> dual‑architecture hardware that helps enterprises run future AI and data intensive workloads with greater flexibility, reliability, and security I think we can ignore the "AI" word here as its presence is only because everything currently has to be AI. So why would IBM add ARM? > As enterprises scale AI and modernize their infrastructure, the breadth of the Arm software ecosystem is enabling these workloads to run…

> ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point

I thought PPC was supposed to be highly performant, but not very efficient. I didn’t think ARM (at least non-Apple ARM) was hitting that level of performance yet. I thought ARM was by far more efficient, but not quite there in terms of raw performance.

But I could be wrong… I’m going from a historical perspective. I haven’t checked PPC benchmarks in quite a while.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#73

Post by zozbot234 »

parthdesai wrote: post #57
phrotoma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…

I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.

Typically it's not just about knowing COBOL as a language, the bottleneck is having real expertise wrt. highly specific, fiddly proprietary frameworks that are implemented on top of COBOL.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#75

Post by bonzini »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #74

IBM is desperate to keep the mainframe relevant. The typical transactional workloads are going to stay on the mainframe, and by bolting on ARM “for AI”they’re giving their customer CIOs a reason to defend their decision to stick with the mainframe.

This certainly has been in the making for longer than the "everything we do must be for AI" bubble. In fact s390 has its own on-die inference engines and they have access to the same caching mechanisms as the main processor (which are quite insane).

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#77

Post by functional_dev »

phrotoma wrote: post #53
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?

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…

is it that bad? maybe that is a secret for a long life. I want a job that never disappears :)

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#78

Post by raverbashing »

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…

But I wonder if this is "much better" than x86 emulation or virt?

Is there really SW that's limited to (Linux) ARM and not x86?

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#79

Post by chasd00 »

phrotoma wrote: post #53
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?

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…

> purpose built gear like Tandem

Tandem! Now there's a name i haven't heard in a long time. A college friend of mine worked with some of their stuff right out of college and I still remember him telling me about it. It seemed like magic, we were both floored with the capabilities.

/we were in our early 20s and the inet was just taking off so there were lots of "magic" everywhere

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#80

Post by [deleted] »

freedomben wrote: post #66
p-e-w wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.

Google was apparently in the running for acquiring Red Hat. I still wonder what Red Hat would be today if Google had acquired instead.

[deleted]
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