IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#191

Post by nineteen999 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 9:18 AM UTC

functional_dev wrote: post #77

phrotoma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and…

is it that bad? maybe that is a secret for a long life. I want a job that never disappears :)

You don't want to work for IBM unless your life is already over. Been there, done that, never again. It's depressing as hell. Your manager doesn't understand what you do, and they think that once your contract expires you'll be sitting around for weeks waiting for them to renew it.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#192

Post by jasomill » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 9:32 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #156

mikepurvis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If every device is directly connected to every other one of n devices with Thunderbolt cables, each with its own dedicated set of PCIe lanes, you'd be limited to 1/n of the theoretical maximum bandwidth between any two devices.

What you really want is for every device to be connected through a massive PCIe switch that allows PCIe lanes to be connected arbitrarily, so, e.g., a pair of EPYCs could communicate over 96 lanes with 32 lanes free to connect to peripheral devices.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#193

Post by Nursie » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

nineteen999 wrote: post #190

Nursie wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spa…

Stratus VOS ran on a bunch of non-x86 hardware, i860, PA-RISC, 68000. It wasn't Windows (UNIX admin with a modicum of Stratus VOS experience in production, back in the day).

It seems I encountered the “ftServer” line, which on closer inspection launched in 2001, and was indeed intel/windows 2k, based around Pentium III Xeon Chips.

They still list old product sheets here, the oldest being the ftServer 5200 AFAICT - https://www.stratus.com/solutions/previous-generation-produc...

https://www.stratus.com/assets/5200hw.pdf

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#194

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:23 PM UTC

kraftverk_ wrote: post #186

rbanffy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Z/OS for ARM then? ;-) I’ve been running VM/370 and MVS on my RPi cluster for a long time now.

Cool, can you share more about the setup?

A 4x RPi Zero Ws Docker Swarm cluster running the dockerised versions of Hercules with VM/370 Sixpack, VM/370 CE and MVS TK 4. All in an IKEA picture frame.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#195

Post by throwaway27448 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

throwawaypath wrote: post #139

throwaway27448 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Current generation of banking software is expanding on the mainframe: IBM Z mainframes play a pivotal role in facilitating 87% of global credit card transactions, nearly $8 trillion in annual payments, and 29 billion ATM transactions each year, amounting to nearly $5 billion per day. Rosamilia highlighted the continuous growth in demand for capacity over the past decade, which has seen inventory expand by 3.5 times.…

That's true, but the proportion is shrinking.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#196

Post by throwaway27448 » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

throwawaypath wrote: post #155

piyh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what was the financial cost of this?

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#197

Post by throwawaypath » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 3:47 PM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #196

throwawaypath wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what was the financial cost of this?

At least $270,000,000 in direct costs [0].

[0] https://www.security.org/identity-theft/breach/capital-one/

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#198

Post by chrsw » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #148

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.

Not now. But my question is, what was stopping IBM from doing what Arm did? We are where we are now and it's too late. But as far as I can see, there was nothing too special about Arm as compared to PowerPC back then, on a technical level.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#199

Post by pezezin » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:16 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33

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?

A better question would probably what they don't do; just going off the wiki page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM ) for recent history, they're in health care (imaging), weather, video streaming, cloud services, Red Hat, managed infrastructure (which branched off into a company called Kyndryl, which has 90.000 employees in 115 countries), warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of sever…

> warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."")

It is not the first time IBM does that...

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#200

Post by pezezin » Fri, Apr 03, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #87

formerly_proven wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Is Raptor still relevant? Looking at their website (https://www.raptorcs.com/) they announce such novel technologies as PCIe 4.0 and DDR 4, and POWER 9 which was released in 2017 while IBM is already on POWER 11.