Posts by Sunset

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

I can't tell if the author doesn't realize Photoshop already has a native Win/ARM port.

IBM packages its Power cloud into 'pods' that run on-prem

Re: HPC?

On price? Horribly. These are emphatically not marketed for HPC.

IBM and LzLabs to clash in UK court over Software Defined Mainframe

Re: Please Explain

As far as I know, they're reimplementing IBM's system interfaces, not merely hardware emulation. They also seem to be bridging DB2 calls to Postgres on the host via a compatibility layer.

If they really have copied enough of z/OS to allow running real commercial applications with no z/OS license, that's rather impressive.

Re: Isn't this... Hercules?

It is not, as far as I know, though I suppose I wouldn't be shocked if it uses some of Hecules's Z core emulation code. To the best of my knowledge, the Software Defined Mainframe product not only provides a hardware emulator but also a compatible implementation of z/OS syscalls - sidestepping the problems earlier emulators have run into with licensing an IBM operating system.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

Re: There are many VLIW systems

Neither TileGX nor Kalray are really DSPs. Tilera was manycore "general-purpose-ish" - it ran Linux (a whiteboxed RHEL) in one image across the system, mostly for networking applications. They went in normal rackmount systems. I have one. Kalray runs Linux too (though they're still in the process of getting their Linux port mainlined) but can't do a single SMP image across all x hundred cores on the chip - they get sliced into partitions of a dozen or so cores, each with its own Linux image.

Tilera never made MIPS stuff. TPM decided they were MIPS based on... nothing, as far as I can tell, and then the claim acquired a life of its own. Their ISA was a 32b and later 64b VLIW with a dense 3-instruction 64-bit bundle.

Ah, yes. The total failure that was a US$4bn business in 2008, at a time when Opteron system revenue was barely half that.

It was niche. It was always niche. It was high-end mission-critical, just like SPARC and Power, but in that niche, it did fine at one point (until the secular decline in that part of the server market as a whole.)

As for "hundreds " - the number is in the thousands, even now. There are individual HP-UX sites with nearly a thousand machines. I would guess there are at least a thousand OpenVMS/IPF sites and at least two thousand running UX. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are 2-3 times that. (Remember that while VMS is available on x86 now, the ISV ecosystem still largely is not - Rdb for instance.)

There are many VLIW systems

Many, many VLIWs exist (and ship annually.) Some general-purpose-ish examples are the Kalray MPPA (alive) and the Tilera TileGX (less alive.) Of less-general-purpose VLIWs, a large and visible example is the Qualcomm Hexagon, which ships in numbers of billions of cores per year.

Sorry Pat, but it's looking like Arm PCs are inevitable

The ARM PC ecosystem - ie, the Snapdragon machines - aren't custom DTBs and BSPs. They're more or less normal EFI/ACPI systems, though with some strangeness in the ACPI implementation that Linux is still adapting to.

Same goes for severs. SeverReady systems have basically the same firmware and system-discovery stack that x86 servers do. There is essentially nothing machine-specific necessary for an ARM server OS vendor.

Not everything is a Pi.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

The 6000 family didn't die in 1989, actually! It got absorbed into Groupe Bull who continued custom-hardware development until about 2006 and sells the product line under emulation to this day. There's a handful of sites in North America and a few more in France.

Nice platform. 36-bit, ASCII, distinctly old school.

Stratus ships latest batch of fault-tolerant Xeon servers

Re: interesting concept

Stratus has their own OS, VOS, which is a Multics-like system that runs on the ftServer hardware and competes directly with Nonstop.

Most ftServers run Linux or NT, but the "absolutely must have nine nines of reliability" lot run VOS.

Google: Turn off Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE to protect your Android from Samsung hijack bugs

Good luck with that

Of the US nationwide carriers, only one even has a non-VoLTE voice capability left (T-Mobile) and that's straight GSM - and going away soon. A lot of modern phones don't even have a way to turn VoLTE off from the GUI.

Perhaps the mad rush to kill off GSM, UMTS/HSPA, and CDMA was actually a mistake?

US adds Inspur – friend to Intel, IBM, Cisco and hyperscalers – to export ban list

Loongson

LoongArch is not MIPS-compatible. At most, it is MIPS-like. Read the ISA manual sometime.

Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet

Re: Apple is testing 24GB stacks. Maybe.

No they don't. They use on-package LPDDR4X or LPDDR5, depending on the type, which is not (despite the name) DDR5 but is also not HBM (which requires an active interposer or equivalent.)

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

Re: No Solidarity with A.I.'s run for profit!

Cool. Time to move off GitHub, then, and to an alternative - and there are many - that respects the dignity of the creator and the worker.

Re: I am not a lawyer

They are members of the ownership class, and you are not. Different rules apply... isn't it grand?

Re: No Solidarity with A.I.'s run for profit!

Well put.

There is a big difference between a) putting my effort into an application for my community, or assisting my fellow worker, and b) working for free to create a paid-for service that will assist capital in profiting off of replacing labour.

No way. That's abhorrent.

IBM expands Power10 line-up with four new systems

Re: Power vs x86/64

Much of the userbase of IBM i - the System Formerly Known As AS/400 - is smaller companies that bought into the platform years ago and have seen no reason to fix what ain't broken. AIX users tend to be large, but i users span the full spectrum from "fortune500 megacorp" to "auto parts shop in Peoria."

Re: Power vs x86/64

Some combination of...

-Direct-attached NVlink for GPUs (relevant to Power9, not particularly relevant for Power10)

-Very high memory bandwidth

-Very high scalability (glueless to 16 sockets)

-Acceleration features not present on Xeon (compression, decimal floating-point for business math)

-High perf/core (especially matters if you're running per-core-licensed software like Oracle)

And most importantly, since most customers are legacy AIX or i...

-Compatibility with previous Power systems