Posts by jlturriff

Intel’s smartNICs probably aren’t for you (yet) says Intel

Catching up to the mainframe

Sounds like intel (and presumably its competitors) are finally catching up to IBM's 360+ architecture mainframe systems with respect to offloaded I/O function. In the 1960s IBM designed the 360 to use Channels (I/O subsystems) to perform I/O independently of the CPU. When soon after they introduced the first PC they tried to improve their I/O performance with their MicroChannel adapter, but it required high-precision clocking and was expensive to produce, so never got into competition.

Channel architecture allows the mainframe CPU to pass just device information and main memory buffer address to the channel, then continue running other tasks until the channel interrupts when its I/O operation is completed. I presume that these smartNICs/IPUs/DPUs will provide something similar to IBM's Channel subsystem?

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Both Electronics AND Electrical Engineers

Heh. Your article's title says "Electrical engineers...", but the article body talks mostly about Elecronics engineers. I suspect that both are endangered species these days; the Electrical engineers (producers of the electric power grid, building wiring, etc) as well as those who produce the hardware on which our software runs. I suppose that the only hardware "Electronics" engineers that are still thriving are the folks who work at chip foundries.

Broadcom sketches out VMware ambitions that stretch from mainframe to cloud

"...from mainframe to cloud"

I will be most interested to see how VMware competes with z/VM on IBM's mainframe systems. :-)