
Specialty Engines?
I would have expected the Register to be more savvy... zIIPs and zAAPs are not specialty engines they are exactly the same as CPs but with a little microcode to only allow certain workloads to run on them. They are a sales tool, nothing more, so IBM are just tweaking their licenses and promoting certain workloads by providing zIIPs and zAAPs (Also a certain amount of marketing BS by calling them specialty engines!). This company is doing nothing innovative, all they are doing is hacking the license cost calculation 'app' for wont of a better analogy. If there was a tool you could run on pSeries that allowed you to fool the LPAR into thinking it had 1/2 the CPUs it really had and hence save 50% on license costs would you use it?