IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

Post by MILP » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

sophacles wrote: post #165

JoachimS wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optimizati…

Post by wmf » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

kev009 wrote: post #166

wmf wrote: post #143

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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.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #169

throwup238 wrote: post #153

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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.

Post by BirAdam » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:22 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #164

mikepurvis wrote: post #137

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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)?

Post by dadoum » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 12:54 AM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #87

formerly_proven wrote: post #68

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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.

ppc64le has other machines. Raptor off the top of my head, but there's also that weird notebook project that seems to be talked about once every few years and probably won't ever happen and some pretty cool stuff in the amiga space (I don't know if that's strictly le but power is supposed to be bi-endian)