121–130 of 135 posts
This feels like a baby step towards Arm being able to emulate z/Arch workloads, maybe with a bit of secret sauce for certain specific operations, which doesn't seem very much like IBM.
ARM can emulate z workloads. https://hercules-390.github.io/html/index.html (or QEMU, for partition level emulation).
Not explained in the article: Every single physical core on the chip decodes and executes both s390x and Arm AArch64 instructions, dynamically switching between the two ISA modes and convert them into micro ops. Mode switching is hypervisor-driven. And those chips are fast. 5.7 Ghz 2nm node. For who: When you need to run Linux programs on high security, mission critical environment. Others should not care.
So why the 2nm x86 chips are clocked so low? Why couldn't they be 6GHz? x86_64 ISA did it again? That said IBM should add RISC-V support.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Failing to defend trademarks for such similarity named and closely related products has extremely high risks.
“Xenon” is a pre-existing word. Intel’s not going to lose protection on “Xeon” for IBM using “Xenon” as an internal codename for their own CPU.
We know about “Xenon” because they used the internal name outside the company. There’s zero difference between an unofficial and official branding when you’re using it in press releases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting that z/VM doesn't seem to support spinning up ARM Linux VMs, at least according to this diagram, but it does support bringing up s390x Linux VMs (the LinuxONE Community Cloud creates Linux VMs under z/VM). Also, it looks like z/OS is running directly on the LPAR, which wasn't common the last time I looked (a decade ago, more or less).
I suspect that is not an inherent limitation of the dual-ISA design (the HotChips slides mention some sort of bidirectional thread state mapping between arm and z), but just about there not being z/VM release that supports that (building such a thing is probably SMoP, but another question is whether that makes business sense).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? So they are just selling to the existing pool of users for which the price just has to come in under the cost/risk of rewriting all their ancient stuff.
> At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? If you want to be a high-volume consumer bank (insurance is similar - it's about processing a high volume of transactions), you have few alternatives. You can get a couple mainframes (you should place them in different datacenters), with their extreme reliability and stability, or you can build your infrastructure with commodity distributed systems, but then…
Most of the existing ones already have mainframes because they were early adopters.
This feels like a baby step towards Arm being able to emulate z/Arch workloads, maybe with a bit of secret sauce for certain specific operations, which doesn't seem very much like IBM.
Not even the weirdest thing IBM did to get compatibility between their mainframes and other CPU architectures. To build the XT/370 and AT/370 expansion cards, they custom-ordered modified 68000s that decoded System/370 instructions instead of the 68k instruction set, with most of the instructions handled by the new microcode and the few stragglers software-emulated: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PC-based…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone else make an ARM CPU that is expressly designed for performance with good cooling ?
Fujitsu replaced their SPARC CPUs with ARM, I think they were pretty good, but last I read about them was a few years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fujitsu replaced their SPARC CPUs with ARM, I think they were pretty good, but last I read about them was a few years ago.
Fujitsu is developing new ARM based CPUs called Monaka, but their focus seems to be HPC and AI, no mention of "normal" servers
(Yes, I'm aware of Ampere Altra. The space desperately needs competition and commoditization, imho.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? If you want to be a high-volume consumer bank (insurance is similar - it's about processing a high volume of transactions), you have few alternatives. You can get a couple mainframes (you should place them in different datacenters), with their extreme reliability and stability, or you can build your infrastructure with commodity distributed systems, but then…
Sure, but there are very very few new consumer banks. Most of the existing ones already have mainframes because they were early adopters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fujitsu is developing new ARM based CPUs called Monaka, but their focus seems to be HPC and AI, no mention of "normal" servers
A Fujitsu ARM Server for normal people that I can buy through a normal retail channel and boot a freakin' generic Linux ISO... that would be great! (Yes, I'm aware of Ampere Altra. The space desperately needs competition and commoditization, imho.)