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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."
Newer versions of *nix are killing older versions of *nix.
The exact opposite of what's happening with Windows.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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.
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.
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.
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.