The z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.
PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc.
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.
I thought about that, too. I think they’re doing this for the same reason IBM has supported Linux LPARs:
since a lot of customers who lease System/z currently probably get overprovisioned hardware that they’ll never fully use, why not try a last-ditch attempt to sell the excess capacity as ARM LPARs?
ARM has better software support for AI applications and half of their presentation was about their inference accelerators that can go in the mainframes (and POWER machines).
IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits.
Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.
No, this is more like any modern processor, which translates instruction codes into micro-ops. To over-simplify IBM just has two of these units per thread rather than one.
I wonder how they handle potential differences in memory barriers, instruction order scheduling and other stuff and do they run the core in one mode continuously or do the mix instruction streams from different instruction sets? Anybody got a link to an article?
Yep. All modern Intel and AMD architectures, save maybe some Atom variants, effectively JIT compile the incoming instructions. It's part of the reason the faster-than-static Java/JVM promises never came to fruition. The goal posts moved after the mainstream chips coopted the approach, and they continue to move as pipelines get deeper and broader and transistor count goes up.
Transmeta was a classic failure--right idea, wrong place & time.
Transmeta did code translation with a software JIT. The hardware side had specific support for x86 semantics, similar to how Apple's M-series has supporting hardware for Rosetta's AOT translation, but neither executes x86 machine code directly.
If by that you are asking whether it has a dynamic ISA controllable at runtime, it appears not. This looks to be a Z processor with arm instructions implemented.
IBM has never stopped innovating. It’s just that most people can’t afford their machines.
There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc.
PS4 moved to AMD.
No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
Xeon vs Xenon
I had always assumed with chip names that similar it was an Intel product. How on earth didn’t the get sued?
IBM stopped building servers based on x86 because the margins were too thin for their tastes, but they never stopped building on top of POWER and Z.
https://research.ibm.com/blog
If you haven't already.
Now you’re thinking like a Big Blue sales rep.
IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits.
Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.
Transmeta was a classic failure--right idea, wrong place & time.