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IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

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Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#101

Post by phrotoma »

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 :)

Man ... this question hits me really hard. I was absolutely miserable by the end of my years at the bank, and the part that really fucked me up was that (at the time) I could not understand why all my colleagues weren't.

Huge generalizations incoming, there are exceptions to every rule, but in my experience there are no nerds who love tech for tech's sake in the banking world. It's entirely staffed by the "C's get degrees" crowd who just want to clock in, clock out, keep their head down, and retire with a nice pension.

I wanted to work on sexy technology, wrangle clouds, contribute to open source, and hack in modern languages.

I have many friends who are still at that bank 20 yrs later. They're all directors of this that or the other thing, still just grinding out some midlevel whatever career and cruising comfortably. If that ticks all your boxes then by all means go hit up a bank job.

By the time I left I couldn't drink enough liquor in a day to rinse the stench of that job off me. If I hadn't managed to slip that place I'd be dead of liver failure by now.

It's the secret for a long life for some folks, but it ain't for everybody.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#102

Post by adrian_b »

kjs3 wrote: post #96
mbreese wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought PPC was supposed to be highly performant, but not very efficient. I didn’t think ARM (at least non-Apple ARM) was hitting that level of performance yet. I thought ARM was by far more efficient, but not quite there in terms of raw performance. But I could be wrong… I’m going from a historical perspective. I haven’t checked PPC benchmarks in quite a while.

Are you guys sure you're not confusing product lines? PPC is a PowerISA architecture, but hasn't been pushing desktop/server level performance for, what, almost 20 years? It's an embedded chip now, and AFAIK IBM doesn't even make them any more. Power (currently "10th gen"(-ish)) is the performant aarchitecture, used in the computers formally known as i-Series, formerly known as RS/6000. It's pretty fast, not not pric…

"PowerPC" was a modification of the original IBM POWER ISA, which was made in cooperation by IBM, Motorola and Apple.

Motorola made CPUs with this ISA. Apple used CPUs with this ISA, some made by IBM and some made by Motorola.

While Motorola and Apple used the name "PowerPC", IBM continued to use the original name "POWER" for its server and workstation CPUs. Later IBM sold its division that made CPUs for embedded applications and for PCs, retaining only the server/workstation CPUs.

However, nowadays, even if the official IBM name is "POWER", calling it "PowerPC" is not a serious mistake, because all the "PowerPC" ISA changes have been incorporated many years ago into the POWER ISA.

So the current POWER ISA is an evolution of the PowerPC ISA, which was an evolution of the original 1990 POWER ISA.

It is better to call it POWER, as saying "PowerPC" may imply a reference to an older version of the ISA, instead of referring to the current version, but the 2 names are the same thing. PowerPC was an attempt of rebranding, but then they returned to the original name.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#104

Post by stonogo »

quietsegfault wrote: post #34
lmpdev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised to find out they still have hardware repair technicians (extremely expensive but reliable: ~$400 per computer around 2022 iirc) But yes they’re mostly enterprise/services/mainframes not anything overly consumer

No, IBM has Unisys contractors, not employees. All the techs I’ve worked with from IBM have been a nightmare. One dropped an entire drive array on the ground, and tried to install it despite it being bent and no longer fitting on the rack. I have been acquired by IBM twice. They are a nightmare, horrible company.

IBM has plenty of hardware techs. They're called system services representatives (SSRs) and if you got a Unisys contractor, that just means you're not spending enough money for IBM to send an SSR.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#105

Post by gpapilion »

Frieren wrote: post #18
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?

IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies. IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.

It’s a very different company post the PwC purchase. They have around 1/3 of the revenue from consulting which tends to push the valuation down due to its relative low margin when compared to software. This also inflates the number of employees.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#106

Post by stonogo »

tempay wrote: post #8
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…

> ARM64 is starting to catch up in performance for a much lower price Why do you say "starting to"? arm64 has been competitive with ppc64le for a fairly long time at this point

There isn't really an arm64 processor available that runs as fast as a Power10 processor, and there isn't really a Power10 processor that runs as efficiently as an arm64 processor, so 'competitive' is probably the wrong word.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#107

Post by stewarts »

kitd wrote: post #93
shrimppersimmon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER. Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications. They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.

They also designed the Cell CPU used in Nintendo Wiis, among others.

[dead]

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#108

Post by 3yr-i-frew-up »

parthdesai wrote: post #57
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…

I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.

Amazing to know AI has eliminated this role that used to have blank cheque.

Re: IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

#109

Post by rbanffy »

mghackerlady wrote: post #91
rbanffy wrote: post #30

AIX for ARM? ;-)

Is modern ARM stuff done big-endian? because AIX is exclusively BE iirc

I never said it'd be an easy port, although there was an x86 (and s/390) port back when time itself was new.

edit: s/390 is big endian.

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