IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

Post by mghackerlady » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:08 PM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #54

roncesvalles wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning. Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to rid…

Post by guerby » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

chasd00 wrote: post #79

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…

> purpose built gear like Tandem Tandem! Now there's a name i haven't heard in a long time. A college friend of mine worked with some of their stuff right out of college and I still remember him telling me about it. It seemed like magic, we were both floored with the capabilities. /we were in our early 20s and the inet was just taking off so there were lots of "magic" everywhere

Post by mghackerlady » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:20 PM UTC

3form wrote: post #58

homarp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI= Arm Ibm in that case

That's quite loaded already. They should consider calling it IBM ARM 64, IA-64 in short.

Post by mghackerlady » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:23 PM UTC

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.

Post by Jarwain » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #78

mcbridematt wrote: post #11

Ah, that explains this patchset that was submitted to the Linux kernel today "KVM: s390: Introduce arm64 KVM" "By introducing a novel virtualization acceleration for the ARM architecture on s390 architecture, we aim to expand the platform's software ecosystem. This initial patch series lays the groundwork by enabling KVM-accelerated ARM CPU virtualization on s390....." https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-k…

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?