121–130 of 204 posts
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?
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?
You don't read much about IBM here, but this is the wrong site to look for them. A big chunk of IBM's business comes from other businesses outside the IT industry. You're more likely to read about IBM in the Wall Street Journal; Google finds "IBM" at wsj.com about 48000 times (it finds "oracle" there about 30000 times).
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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
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> 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
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> 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…
And the single thread side isn't that good either, but SMT8 is a quite nice software licensing trick
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?
MacOS? (hides)
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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.
IBM had a hand in both however
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Is modern ARM stuff done big-endian? because AIX is exclusively BE iirc
That, weirdly, should be fine; ARM is bi-endian in the sense of being perfectly happy to run either way. In fact, the easiest way I know of to test software on a big endian system is to run a perfectly ordinary Raspberry Pi with NetBSD's big endian port for it:)