I can't be the only one that simultaneously appreciates that IBM are still in the game but remains mystified as to who is actually buying and using this stuff.
They simply have to have some farms in government running this to make it make sense.
CursedSilicon · 51m ago
On the low-end. Ever shopped at Costco? It's all IBM AS/400's handling the back-end. That's why all their Windows 11 PC's have big black and green terminal apps running front and center
On the high-end? Banks, airports, hospitals, research labs. There's a lot of places that need the kind of fault tolerance that specifically IBM POWER systems provide
EDIT: Okay, IBM POWER "systems". They've been described as mainframes to me so I went with that terminology
nabla9 · 8m ago
IBM Z mainframes use Z processors and now Telum, Telum II processors, not POWER.
wolf550e · 41m ago
"mainframes" are z/Architecture, not POWER.
No comments yet
gosub100 · 42m ago
I seriously doubt there's a POWER mainframe in the back of Costco to handle the 3 UPC barcode scans per second. It's possible that every Costco store funnels its orders to a single mainframe somewhere.
I think a more realistic case is the visa and MasterCard credit card networks that have almost 0% downtime.
CursedSilicon · 18m ago
Not a POWER Mainframe, no. But AS/400's come in many sizes. The smallest ones are roughly the size of a standard workstation
dardeaup · 40m ago
No such thing as a POWER mainframe. IBM's POWER lines (i and p) are different from their mainframe line (z).
chiffre01 · 37m ago
I think it's more likely they have a rack of IBM iSeries servers in the back someplace, or maybe in a colo data center.
nxobject · 42m ago
For background to sibling comments - AS/400 aka "System i" was historically a separate line of processors, but is now POWER running a software translation layer.
To illustrate why the AS/400 had its market niche, the Cali Cartel had a very successful installation of an AS/400. Apparently they used it to do both "business analytics" and back-office tasks.
I love working with the POWER ISA, it makes me happy to see they're still making high performance chips. I really wish these were more accessible to the average user though.
Keyframe · 29m ago
judging by the comments and (lack of proper) answers, the realm mystery is who are the customers?! Before, POWER excelled at bandwidth.. like real torrent of bandwidth. What's the edge these days?
JLO64 · 1h ago
I hate phrasing a question like this, but I would genuinely like to know who the customer for this architecture is. My understanding is that cloud (and for that matter consumer) is all x86/ARM.
So is it science/defense that makes up their user base? I have an acquaintance who works at NASA mention that IBM stuff was really good for processing large amounts of data fast. Is that their primary advantage over other architectures?
doctorshady · 45m ago
Raptor Systems makes a bunch of ATX compatible POWER motherboards. As to who buys them, it's not entirely clear. If they were a little cheaper, I'd pick one up in a heartbeat. $3,000 for a CPU and motherboard is a bit hard to rationalize for what's effectively just nerding out though: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html .
For the embedded market, NXP makes a bunch of QorIQ chips based around the POWER ISA - mostly for telecom products. These are actually reasonably common in certain devices, but not really what you'd want in a desktop.
Palomides · 30m ago
raptor is still on power9 chips from 2017, I have one, but it's not a reasonable purchase unless you're a very very serious open source believer
doctorshady · 20m ago
My understanding is there's issues around POWER10 that stopped it from being adopted: https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-thats-tro... . For me personally, having worked enough with embedded POWER chips to get weirdly comfortable with ISA, given the choice, I'd love to have a system like this to write pure ASM stuff on. Not for any practical reason in the slightest; pretty much in the same spirit of souping up a go kart.
On that note, out of curiosity, how do these compare with x86 and ARM chips from that era?
themafia · 4m ago
The last I checked most of the supporting mainframe systems use POWER. For example the DASD storage devices are all using POWER CPUs.
dlcarrier · 27m ago
It's customers that never migrated to x86/ARM.
wmf · 1h ago
IBM pulled out of the HPC market several years ago.
dmitrygr · 1h ago
mainframes
edit: thought some ibm mainframes used power in helper roles.
wmf · 58m ago
Power isn't a mainframe.
gosub100 · 48m ago
I think you meant to say "mainframe isn't a customer" ? Power architecture runs almost exclusively on mainframes.
dardeaup · 38m ago
Correction - POWER architecture runs exclusively on 'i' and 'p' series. 'z' series is mainframe.
wmf · 38m ago
That still isn't correct.
dmitrygr · 56m ago
Hm, I thought some of the peripheral controllers in IBM mainframes used power, guess i was wrong.
wmf · 59m ago
Besides the memory improvements these slides are really vague.
They simply have to have some farms in government running this to make it make sense.
On the high-end? Banks, airports, hospitals, research labs. There's a lot of places that need the kind of fault tolerance that specifically IBM POWER systems provide
EDIT: Okay, IBM POWER "systems". They've been described as mainframes to me so I went with that terminology
No comments yet
I think a more realistic case is the visa and MasterCard credit card networks that have almost 0% downtime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI
To illustrate why the AS/400 had its market niche, the Cali Cartel had a very successful installation of an AS/400. Apparently they used it to do both "business analytics" and back-office tasks.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-...
So is it science/defense that makes up their user base? I have an acquaintance who works at NASA mention that IBM stuff was really good for processing large amounts of data fast. Is that their primary advantage over other architectures?
For the embedded market, NXP makes a bunch of QorIQ chips based around the POWER ISA - mostly for telecom products. These are actually reasonably common in certain devices, but not really what you'd want in a desktop.
On that note, out of curiosity, how do these compare with x86 and ARM chips from that era?
edit: thought some ibm mainframes used power in helper roles.