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AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot
flnca writes "Today, I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them, and I was surprised to see that IBM is going to give its IntelliStation POWER Series workstations the boot in January '09. A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs? IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance). Some years ago, I enjoyed hacking away on an RS/6000 workstation running AIX 4.2, and it was a pure joy. Not only the kernel, but also the admin tools, like smit and smitty. Their blade-centric solution uses Windows as a client for workstation application. This truly sounds like IBM wants AIX only for servers anymore. I'm not amused. Although, eXceed on Windows with an XDCMP server running on AIX might also be a viable solution ... whatever. But it can't beat a native POWER box sitting on your desk, that's for sure."
The new I7 and maybe the new 45 nm AMD cpus are probably a better solution for a workstation then a Power these days. Linux has more hardware and software support than AIX so IBM probably sees the future as an I7 running Linux.
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Newer versions of *nix are killing older versions of *nix.
The exact opposite of what's happening with Windows.
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This is a huge blow to scientific and engineering computing. I know of thousands of POWER based Intellistations at several aerospace companies. CAD and finite element analysis software runs on these boxes, usually CATIA, NASTRAN, and some CFD codes. Engineering modeling and simulation software has been running on AIX for a while. Only now are Windows boxes near the performance that engineers need. The only good that might come of this is that hopefully the surplus market will be flooded with POWER based Intellistations and AIX CDs.
Are you saying using smit and smitty was a pure joy?
Bwahahaha!
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Seriously. The toolset sucks. None of the major FOSS projects even know or care if their projects will build on AIX anymore, including (most importantly for me) the CPAN (CPAN testers haven't tested CPAN builds on AIX for years as far as I can tell). The command line utilities have feature sets from like 1976, so you have to install a bunch of GNU packages if you want to get anything done. The best part, IBM will happily sell you a pile of AIX hardware and promise you that the millions of bucks you're getting ready to spend for software to run on it will be well-spent, then you'll find out that half the stuff has never been tested in the real world. Fact is, in the time I spent working on (struggling with?) AIX recently I saw little evidence that IBM is putting any resources into AIX.
slashdot broke my sig
YellowDog makes a PowerPC based Linux machine. The latest Linux Journal has a review of it:
http://us.fixstars.com/products/powerstation/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10263
Not perfect, but workable.
Forgive me, because I'm a linux guy (that's all I've ever used and known), and because of that, I don't know what the benefits of having an AIX machine on the desktop would be.
I understand that on certain large hardware, AIX is preferable due to hardware or other requirements, but what is the draw on the desktop? Is there superior software, or stability? Management tools?
I manage Linux servers, and I have linux on my desktop because it seems effortless to me now, but I can't imagine that if I had one of the BSDs, Solaris, or any other unix that my experience would be different. What is the draw? I'm not flaming or trolling, I'm really interested in being educated.
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Power6 was the first one where they solved the high frequency power leakage problems by doing a hybrid design, so I assume it is not a Power5. Your point is still valid though :). It is doubtful that the power 6 beats any current Intel or AMD cpu for $/performance.
For raw single chip performance it would be hard to beat.
The desktop was under $10k, sits at my desk, and is mine to do what I want with it. Currently I'm testing AIX 6.1 (works great, cool new features). It'll run KDE and an ancient version of firefox, if I want, usually I just have X with multiple shells open.
Whenever I need to do something particularly major in our prod environment, it's fully vetted on this desktop first. OS upgrades, patches, Oracle upgrades, firmware, new utility scripts - I have a great little test environment for them. And alt-disk-install makes it a snap to get back to 'normal'
Do I see any use for one outside of that? Not really, except maybe 3d rendering or something.
- Tony
Wow. That brought back memories. Not because I was ever a big CDE user, but because I've used Xfce since early in it's 3.0 days - Shortly after it started using gtk, but still looked a lot like a pretty CDE.
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I agree ... I'm a Linux person. I was introduced to AIX last year and have reached a similar conclusion. People in many companies think that because they paid 50K for a IBM AIX box, it must be awesome. But how awesome is that 700Mhz box they bought several years ago now? Nobody bothers to actually benchmark things or consider alternatives like horizontal scaling. Managers and other clueless people believe to install a 50k Oracle license, you NEED a 50K AIX box.
While it is possible to install GNU utils and get an AIX box somewhat up to speed, what I've seen is that AIX admins/users are still stuck in the dark ages, completely unaware of FOSS alternatives and best practices. (They ONLY use telnet at my workplace)
It is the "easiest" to get things configured using smitty, which is geared towards a person who does not care to know anything about the OS underbelly. Smitty is intimately integrated with AIX, such that it is far more difficult to administer multiple machines because of smittys and AIX weird nature.
The only reason IBM can make so much money from AIX is because of clueless managers and "old" users who never adapt.
It is well known that the reason P6 chips run at 5Ghz, is because they are totally uncompetitive against Intel/AMD at lower speeds. They were delayed because IBM had a tough time getting 5Ghz yeilds and now it leaves them less headroom, unless they can get to 6 and 7Ghz quickly.
These days, many FOSS tools are available as binaries for AIX (but not latest versions).There have been several occasions where I have had to compile stuff and have simply given up because the FOSS author has not updated his build for AIX.
We just threw away several 300-700Mhz machines that were originally bought for 30K+. Why not buy good x86 stuff for 8K and throw that away later?
From someone a little bit more objective: I've managed AIX, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX, Windows, SCO and *BSD boxes for many, many years.
Out of all of them -- Linux and AIX have by far the best command line and GUI management tools for enterprise computing. Smit and Smitty are at least as good (and in some ways better than) SuSE's YaST or Redhat's system-config-*. (HP guys, shut up. Smit/smitty blows SAM out of the water and you know it. Go back to the hole you climbed out of. ;) For example, I have yet to find a GUI LVM tool that can do what smit can do as well as smit can do it.
If you were managing an all-AIX environment, you'd definitely want an AIX machine on your desk, not a Linux machine.
OTOH, if you're handy with scripting and whatnot, nothing beats a Linux machine in a mixed envrionment. ;)
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Most of the classic 8-bit CPUs have variable-length instruction coding, multiple-clock instructions controlled by state machines, and support indexed memory addressing modes and memory writes on general operations (instead of dedicated load/store instructions). All of these are hallmarks of a CISC architecture.
The 6502 may have had a few RISC like features if you pretend that the first 256 bytes of memory are registers, but it still doesn't really qualify as genuine RISC.
AIX still has significant advantages over Linux for us. A lot (all?) of the stuff that is new in AIX has come from the AS/400 390 mainframe stuff, and the hardware for AIX line is now the same as that for the AS/400 line (or whatever they're all called this week).
For our business, AIX is still rock solid, has excellent support (as you'd expect for the cost) and can dynamically switch resources between virtual systems. The CPU allocation is wonderful. It can automatically assign spare CPU to any system that needs it, giving preference to production systems.
The virtual networking and hardware self-monitoring is also far superior to what little I've seen in the Windows area.
While I can't comment on other systems, AIX has given us a lot of flexibility and reliability that the Intel team here (mostly Windows) don't get in their virtual server environment.
Of course all this is changing, and the smaller systems are getting the bigger system stuff.
So the real question is not "how ready is Linux to AIX?" but rather "can Linux do what I want now?" because all the mainframe technology is filtering down to be accessible to consumer grade stuff.
A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs?
The first sentence is incomplete, and the second one is a run on. I didn't even notice it until you asked because the construction is not unusual at all, even though it is technically wrong. There's a couple of these in your summary, but I wouldn't have immediately pegged you for a non-native English writer since most of us write like that anyways in informal postings.
http://www.sun.com/desktop/ Note, no high end Sparc workstations. No fanfare or trumpets. Just gone. One day you could order them, the next you couldn't. It made me sad as my manager was thinking about kitting us developers out with some monster workstations for development.
Was it simply that the AIX box was a multiproc power system?
No, it was the system architecture of the RS/6000 and the clarity of AIX that I enjoyed. It was like "playing with the real toys". At that time, Linux for instance, wasn't half as far as it is now.