IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#141

Post by Nursie » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #81

Nursie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning. Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to rid…

x86 servers weren't that common in the 90s and early 200s, that was all sun or the other commercial unix peoples things

In the 90s, perhaps not massively, but gaining ground very early in the 00s. I started my career in 2000 and most of the credit-card related stuff I built until ‘05 was targeted at Windows, Linux and Solaris, with a variety of other Unix platforms depending on the client/project.

But the x86 I was referring to in my comment above, Stratus, was (maybe still is?) an exotic attempt to enter the mainframe-reliability space with windows. IIRC it effectively ran two redundant x86 machines in lockstep, keeping them in sync somehow, so that if hardware on one died the other could continue. I have no idea how big their market was, but I know of at least one acquirer/issuer credit card system that ran on that hardware around 2002-3.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#142

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #120

mghackerlady wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x86 servers weren't that common in the 90s and early 200s, that was all sun or the other commercial unix peoples things

Sun was dying in 2000. I was busy deploying BSD and a bit later Linux for all our x86 gear.

Meanwhile in 2000 we only considered Linux good enough to host our MP3 file server and quake for the late nights.

All our production stuff was being deployed on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows NT/2000 Server.

Likewise most of my university degree used DG/UX and Solaris, when Red-Hat Linux was first deployed on the labs, it was after the DG/UX server died, and I was already on the fourth year of a five year degree.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#143

Post by wmf » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #78

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?

Probably Intel and AMD aren't willing to do this deal but Arm is.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#144

Post by bigyabai » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #136

Teever wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I was hoping Apple was going to do with a refreshed Mac Pro. I had envisoned a smaller tower design that with PCI slots and Apple developing and selling daughter cards that were basically just a redesigned macbook pro PCB but with a PCI-E edge connector and power connector. The way I see it a user could start with a reasonably powerful base machine and then upgrade it over time and mix and match different…

You can do basically that by connecting over Thunderbolt 5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

Homogenous RDMA is less like a daughterboard and more like a brother or sisterboard.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#145

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #137

bombcar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From the perspective of PC building, I've always thought it would be neat if the CPU/storage/RAM could go on a card with a PCIe edge connector, and then that could be plugged into a "motherboard" that's basically just a PCIe multiplexer out to however many peripheral cards you have. Maybe it's gimmicky, but I feel like you could get some interesting form factors with the CPU and GPU cards sitting back-to-back or side…

Oh, going back to a backplane computer design? That could be cool, though I assumed we moved away from that model for electrical/signaling reasons? If we could make it work, it would be really cool to have a system that let you put in arbitrary processors, eg. a box with 1 GPU and 2 CPU cards plugged in

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#146

Post by wmf » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #85

3form wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite loaded already. They should consider calling it IBM ARM 64, IA-64 in short.

IBM was one of the few companies not buying the whole itanium nonsense iirc

IBM wasted plenty of effort on Itanic but at least they were smart enough not to cancel any of their architectures.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#147

Post by bombcar » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #137

bombcar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

From the perspective of PC building, I've always thought it would be neat if the CPU/storage/RAM could go on a card with a PCIe edge connector, and then that could be plugged into a "motherboard" that's basically just a PCIe multiplexer out to however many peripheral cards you have. Maybe it's gimmicky, but I feel like you could get some interesting form factors with the CPU and GPU cards sitting back-to-back or side…

This was (is?) done - some strange industrial computers for sure and I think others, where the "motherboard" was just the first board on the backplane.

The transputer b008 series was also somewhat similar.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#148

Post by wmf » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

chrsw wrote: post #48

Maybe I don't know enough technical details about these CPU architectures or IP agreements, but I don't see why IBM couldn't have done what Arm did but with PowerPC.

PowerPC doesn't have the organic ecosystem that ARM has.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#149

Post by bombcar » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

bigyabai wrote: post #144

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do basically that by connecting over Thunderbolt 5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248644

Homogenous RDMA is less like a daughterboard and more like a brother or sisterboard.

M5 processor plugged into the same RDMA as IBM POWER for that "brother from anothermotherboard".

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#150

Post by acdha » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #90

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…

>So IBM wants to switch to ARM without making a too big fuzz about it. That was my first thought too, but it does not make sense, because if IBM would sell ARM-based servers nobody would buy from them instead of using cheaper alternatives. As revealed in another comment, at least for now their strategy is to provide some add-in cards for their mainframe systems, containing an ARM CPU which is used to execute VMs in w…

People buy IBM for the support and exotic features around high-availability and expansion. I think they’d be able to do an ARM migration if needed since they have deep experience with emulation (there is mainframe code from the 1970s running on POWER today on nested emulators) and they have a lot of precedent for their support engineers working closely with customers.