POWER Processors, SMT and the True Origins of AI

Crow writes "IBM developerWorks has posted an interview with John McCalpin, one of the guys who works on the POWER line of processors. He discusses work on POWER5 (and how the design process works at IBM -- he's also involved in work on the POWER7) and defends the decision that IBM doesn't hand-tune their ICs (as has often been criticized on Ars Technica. Also covers some of the features in the POWER processors, like SMT, the Hypervisor and virtualization -- even addresses the question of whether AIX was designed by space aliens or not. The POWER5 just broke the 3 million transactions per minute barrier on the TPC-C benchmark."

Comments

Re:Comp Eng at IBM

[pohl]

Though your skepticism may be warranted, it appears that you have no understanding of what it means to work on a large team engineering effort. The article mentions in the first paragraph that there are hundreds of engineers working on the POWER processors. Wouldn't cooperation be an essential aspect of making that work? Do you think everybody stands around sucking their thumb while one hotshot at the top makes the design decisions? It's more likely that experimentation and lively debates lead to design decisions, don't you think?