AIX for ARM? ;-)
Is modern ARM stuff done big-endian? because AIX is exclusively BE iirc
IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
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Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#92This 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?
They own things like:
1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is by far the most commonly deployed Linux variant among US Enterprise orgs.
2. Ansible
3. Podman
4. Hashicorp Terraform / Consul / Packer / Vagrant / Nomad / Etc.
5. Giant B2B services arm
6. Mainframe, which a lot of science organizations / governments / credit card companies still run. Sometimes you may have an IBM rep show up to replace a part on the mainframe you didn't even know was broken - very reliable, fault tolerant system.
7. The only service I know where you can rent Quantum computing time in the cloud
8. Probably a ton of other things I'm not even aware of.
9. Red Hat OpenShift - so if you're big enterprise running k8s on prem, there's a good chance it's OpenShift, especially in banking / finance / government.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#93This 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?
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 Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications.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.
They also designed the Cell CPU used in Nintendo Wiis, among others.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example TSYS is super expensive and is dying out. The current generation of banking software is very much shifting to distributed software across commodity data centers.
Source? Interested in learning more about this
Red Hat OpenShift (IBM) is what a lot of banks have settled on. Red Hat went all in maybe 5+ years ago in capturing those institutions.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#95> 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 do not think that I have seen any public benchmark for more than a decade that can compare ARM-based CPUs with IBM POWER CPUs.
The recent generations of IBM POWER CPUs have not been designed for good single-thread performance but only for excellent multi-threaded performance.
So I believe that an ARM CPU from a flagship smartphone should be much faster in single thread that any existing IBM POWER CPU.
On the other hand, I do not know if there exists any ARM-based server CPU that can match the multi-threaded performance of the latest IBM POWER CPUs.
At least for some workloads the performance of the ARM-based CPUs must be much lower, as the IBM CPUs have huge cache memories and very fast memory and I/O interfaces.
The ARM-based server CPUs should win in performance per watt (due to using recent TSMC processes vs. older Samsung processes) and in performance per dollar, but not in absolute performance.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Are you guys sure you're not confusing product lines? PPC is a PowerISA architecture, but hasn't been pushing desktop/server level performance for, what, almost 20 years? It's an embedded chip now, and AFAIK IBM doesn't even make them any more. Power (currently "10th gen"(-ish)) is the performant aarchitecture, used in the computers formally known as i-Series, formerly known as RS/6000. It's pretty fast, not not price competitive. They aren't really the same thing.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#97It 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.
It's what Intel did with x86 a few decades before the modern smart phone.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#98I wonder if we end up with z series running on arm long term. The value in z series is in the system design and ecosystem, IBM could engineer an architecture migration to custom CPUs based on ARM cores. They would still be mainframe processors, but likely able to be able to reduce investment in silicon and supporting software.
You can run 1960s System/360 binaries unmodified on modern z/OS. The system also uses a lot of "high level assembler" and "system provided assembly macros" making a complete architecture switch extremely painful and complicated. They called their new architecture "ESAME" for a while for a pretty obvious reason.
I don't think that would change if the underlying architecture changes; IBM has been committed to backward compatibility for a long time. Some hypothetical future mainframe class IBM ARM would undoubtedly be able virtualize a 360/370/390 without breaking a sweat. And ARM will undoubtedly enable IBM to add custom emulation hardware to their spin on ARM if they need it.
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#99Ah, 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.
I loved the era of "daughter cards" which were just entire computers on a board.
things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6b4lYOI0GQ could get you a really interesting form of multitasking
Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
#100Earlier 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.
IBM sells hyperconverged AIO OpenShift on Dell & Lenovo hardware now: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/fusion-hci-systems/2.12.x?topic=...