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IBM Announces New AS/400s With SOI Chips
Chris Brewer writes: "IBM announced today a new line of AS/400e servers powered by the world's first production chips made of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) transistors and copper wiring. They say the addition of SOI adds a further 20-30% to performance beyond copper. They have a new high-end server that's 3.6x faster than before, entry level servers for running Domino (and presumably Linux), and all support XML. Further details can be found at IBM's AS/400 site. "
Suer, i await the time when all press releases simply say "New hardware, faster, more expensive, fancy new production process. Linux, XML, WAP, Internet, WWW, Open Source, multimedia, next generation. You want one."
It's sure to be a winner, it's got all the buzzwords.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Yep, five+ years ago you could get a silicon on sapphire MIPS R3000 (or R2000? I think R3000), it ran at 25Mhz I think, and cost over $10k.
I think IBM's contribution (this time around) to SOI is that they have a way to do it without incresing costs dramatically.
However I'm not a process expert, so take this info with a grain of sand. Sorry.
Well, they've got all the buzzwords right, but I hope that someone in Rochester or Armonk decides to actually market the damn thing.
The 400 is a rock solid box. In 4 years of working with one, I've only had 2 unplanned outages -- neither the fault of the 400.
They have a long way to go with some of their internet tools. The POP server doesn't support the full POP3 command set, the HTTP server is unwieldy and slow (IMO).
My personal feeling for Linux on the 400 is that it could probably be done on the IPCS (Integrated PC Server), which would be useful for a firewall, since Big Blue has decided to discontinue the firewall product for the 400. Other than that, it seems that it would be foolish to try to port Linux natively, although very cool. :)
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
Thad
Thad
Goody. Now I can replace my mail server.
bugger.net | MunkAndPhyber.com
The gate of a MOS transistor is essentially a capacitor, and the speed at which it can operate is determined by how long this capacitor takes to charge/discharge.
Basic physics will tell you that the thicker the capacitor, the smaller its value, and the faster the transistor. By putting the transitor on an SOI wafer, the silicon-dioxide layer acts as extra thickness for the capacitor, reducing its value, and making the thing faster.
Erm, not exactly.
You're right that gate capacitance is important, but what's really affected by the insulator layer are two different things:
There's more on this at IBM's web site.
Yes the AS/400 has a very weird architecture, more along the lines of a mainframe than an intel clone server. As it is the AS/400 doesnt run Linux, and according to IBM there is little chance of that happening any time soon, simply because it would require much more work than any other IBM system.
/." post anyway.
Seeing as the rest of the article posted is a load of nonsense (hey an xml compliant processor!), noone should read the Linux comment as anything other than a pretty silly "lets mention linux to get on
Ewan
I have serious doubts whether IBM is willing to let Linux run on AS/400s. Large parts of the machine's and the OS's internals are confidential and I don't think IBM will change that. Allowing other OS's onto the hardware also goes against one of the AS/400's key points, its stability.
Now there is an option called the Integrated Netfinity Server, which is basically a PC on a card. Linux will probably run quite happily on that on disk space allocated to it by the AS/400. That disk space is usually also included in the AS/400 backup sequence.
The stuff on the web site is about older models. IBM used the bizarre architecture (48 bit?) up until the 3XX series. Current AS/400s contain PowerPCs AFAIK.
I agree with the rest of the article though. The new AS/400 models rock. While I would never want an AS/400 at home, I want hot plug PCI (also included) on my PC!
Coward 312-321
I know you are troll, but I have a personal answer nonetheless.
The reason there _can_ live 6 billion people is technological development. Without it, we wouldn't have starving children in Somalia, their parents would have starved to dead long ago. Of course, the most direct relevant technology is agriculture. I happen to work at the Agricultural University of Denmark. We work together with the Danish foreign aid service (among others) on projects in Africa and Asia. One of the things we do, is to calculate the most efficient and non-poluting use of fertilizers with the help computer simulations. I program these. The big simulations can take a month to run on a classroom full of PC's (we cannot afford specialized hardware, so we borrow the student PC's when they have vacation). When the PC's get faster, we can make better simulations. Which improve our agricultural techniques. Which help the starving children Somalia.
Yes, I know the technology isn't made for our sake, but nonetheless it benefits much more than just teenage boys wanting to play cool computer games (not that these run AS/400).
Ugh. They'll never catch on.
Pretty soon we're going to have chips that can crank out millions of calculations per second... /proc/cpuinfo
Um, hello? I think we've had that for quite some time, really:
~> cat
[...]
bogomips : 552.14
Those are bogus, sure, but in this case, the number is closely related to the clock speed of the processor, which is 550 MHz. It's not difficult to imagine that the CPU then actually does "millions of calculations per second", is it? Also, I somehow doubt that you're really Yu Suzuki (of Sega fame, in case someone wondered)...
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
As of the latest release of OS/400, the AS/400 already has the capibility of running Posix compliant binaries. Why spend the time and money porting Linux to a hardware platform that ALREADY runs most of the applications? (Geek bragging rights aside).
SOI = Silicon-on-Insulator
Most chips are fabricated on pure silicon wafers. SOI wafers have a layer of silicon dioxide close to the surface. The transistors are built above this layer.
Why SOI?
The gate of a MOS transistor is essentially a capacitor, and the speed at which it can operate is determined by how long this capacitor takes to charge/discharge.
Basic physics will tell you that the thicker the capacitor, the smaller its value, and the faster the transistor.
By putting the transitor on an SOI wafer, the silicon-dioxide layer acts as extra thickness for the capacitor, reducing its value, and making the thing faster.
TJ
Owl tried to think of something wise to say, but couldn't.
The AS/400 hardware has become notably less bizzare in the recent releases; PowerPC chips, the notion of conventional address space, etc.. The Linux on AS/400 page you point is devoted to getting Linux up on much older hardware; Proprietary processors, single address space, needs a tape IPL, power equivalent to a Pentium. It's not a terrible issue really; They need to know the tape formatting to generate an image, need a working GNU toolchain set, and the port would happen in under a month. To date, they've been contemplating a port to the bare CISC iron. Several people have suggested targeting the IM layer, so Linux would run on everything from a B10 to a brand new monster...
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Marketing.
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
I thought this wasn't quite available yet, owing to some pretty bizarre architectural intricacies of the AS/400 platform. (The single address space issue for one).
This Linux on AS/400 site has a wealth of information, as well as some comment from IBM.
Cheers, Mark
--
"I am not a nut-bag." -- Millroy the Magician
-qabi
Whew, for a second there I thought IBM was trying to push a non-XML-compliant processor. Could have really hindered its adoption in enterprise computing.
Processor landmarks aside, I think this actually says a lot more, namely that IBM think that midrange computing still has a lot of life in it. There are an awful lot of business out there who don't want to move hardware platform, and this is the sort of market they're angling for - a significant performance boost, without the upheval of migration to a new architecture and OS.
As for Linux, I hadn't realised that it could run on the 'e' series yet, but I'd like to see it in action....
M.