Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

newsroom.ibm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 204 posts

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#151

Post by mikepurvis »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #145
mikepurvis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe PCIe is a leader/follower system, so there'd probably be some issues with that unless the CPUs specifically knew they were sharing, or there was a way for the non-leader units to know they they shouldn't try to control the bus.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#152

Post by Grosvenor »

Teever wrote: post #134
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

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…

Apple already experimented with this with the prototype Jonathan computer. It's very late 80's in its aesthetic, and I love it.

https://512pixels.net/2024/03/apple-jonathan-modular-concept...

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#153

Post by throwup238 »

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…

That would crush latency on RAM.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#154

Post by hrmtst93837 »

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.

[flagged]

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#155

Post by throwawaypath »

piyh wrote: post #131
g947o wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? Interested in learning more about this

https://nazymaltbridge.substack.com/i/186393578/technology-i...

That post fails to mention Capital One's move from IBM mainframes to AWS was one of the reasons they suffered one of the largest data breaches in history.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#156

Post by bombcar »

mikepurvis wrote: post #151
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe PCIe is a leader/follower system, so there'd probably be some issues with that unless the CPUs specifically knew they were sharing, or there was a way for the non-leader units to know they they shouldn't try to control the bus.

But if we're dreaming, we can have the backplane be actually multiple (Nx thunderbird 5 cables connected each slot to all other slots directly).

Then each device can be a host, a client, at the same time and at full bandwidth.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#157

Post by mech422 »

Nursie wrote: post #54
roncesvalles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

IIRC the Stratus/Model 88 was Moto 68K chips, not x86? I worked on them for years on wall st. - really nice machines! :-D

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#158

Post by wat10000 »

bombcar wrote: post #99
trebligdivad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Now we have cables that include computers more powerful than an old mainframe. So if it pleases you, just think of all the tiny little daughter computers hooked up to your machine now.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#160

Post by greedo »

pjmlp wrote: post #142
greedo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well we were a small startup, and the idea of using AIX was a non-starter. Solaris was lovely, but our E250 was only for mail, and in hindsight we should have stood up a FreeBSD server with dovecot or something instead of a system that we migrated off of a year later.

We did use NT/2K internally but that was because we had some who insisted on using SMB via Windows.

Such fun times. The nix and nix-like OSes were spreading like fire. I never would have thought I'd ever wrangle them for the majority of my career.

Post reply on HN