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IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

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Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#161

Post by enether »

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?

They make $8-9B a year (~90% profit margins) selling software to mainframes, which were deployed ages ago but still have to be maintained because critical COBOL business code was written on their systems - and migration is too riskly/costly.

To give you an idea:

- of the risk in regulated industries like banking: a UK bank was once fined *$62 million* for botching a mainframe migration and causing downtime. - of the difficulty and risk in non-tech industries: Australia once spent *$120 million* trying to migrate its social security system off mainframes... and failed.

Mainframes are not their only business, of course, but it's a major cash cow that's under appreciated. I, for one, didn't know that business keeps growing.

Coincidentally, I wrote about the topic of mainframes with relation to IBM's acquisition of Confluent here today: https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisitio...

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#162

Post by greedo »

mghackerlady wrote: post #135
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.

Java was exploding and sun machines were the server platform at the time. Yes, the dot com bubble burst and their stock was in freefall but all the things deployed to sun that survived the bubble didn't just disappear or move to X86 overnight

Well you can say the same about COBOL...

Just because things hung around didn't mean that Sun/Solaris/Java were long for this world. Linux/x86 was just too cheap compared to SPARC gear. Even if it wasn't as robust as the Sun gear, it just made too much sense especially if you didn't have any legacy baggage.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#164

Post by SoftTalker »

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's basically what S-100 systems were, isn't it (on a much slower bus)?

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#165

Post by sophacles »

JoachimS wrote: post #56
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?

Everything. They have done for decades, and will do for decades. And what IBM focus on is probably worth looking into. IBM (imho) is in the absolute frontline in quantum computers. One could argue if the number of startups in QC means that there is an actual market or not. Companies that lives on VC or the valuation of their stock. But IBM is not showy, not on the front pages, does not live on VC or stock valuation.…

> And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.

Evidence for this is in the number of articles that talk about simulated annealing/quantum annealing (or other optimization problems) w/r/t QC rather than crypto. Sure attention seeking headlines always focus on prime factoring, and the security aspect has a lot more enthusiast interest, but when you look past that into deeper stuff, a lot of the focus is on the optimization.

And many industries can dramatically benefit from better optimization - think about how many companies are at their core bin-packers or traveling salesmen.... off the top of my head anything in logistics, airlines, many aspects of the energy sector, and on and on.

The flash is in reading secrets, the money is in quantum annealing.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#166

Post by kev009 »

wmf wrote: post #143
raverbashing wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IBM actually owns x86 rights still. They last used it to do something similar called Lx86 which ran x86 VMs on POWER CPUs.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#167

Post by andrewf »

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.

AIX is still ppc64be. That and s390x are the only big-endian CPUs I can think of which aren't end-of-life, which I think is going to be an increasing maintenance burden over time for IBM alone.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#168

Post by kev009 »

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?

With each passing CEO it seems to get more and more nebulous. But the mainframes are still technically interesting and they seem to be able to attract and retain quality CPU designers.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#169

Post by mikepurvis »

throwup238 wrote: post #153
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…

That would crush latency on RAM.

The RAM and CPU would still be on the same card together, and for the typical case of a single GPU it would just be 16x lanes direct from one to the other.

For cases where there are other cards, yes there would more contention, but few expansion cards are able to saturate more than a lane or two. One lane of PCIe Gen5 is a whopping 4 GB/s in each direction, so that theoretically handles a dual 10gige NIC on its own.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#170

Post by jhallenworld »

roncesvalles wrote: post #41
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?

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…

How well do commodity systems protect your financial transactions from cosmic ray-induced bit errors?
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