IBM and OpenPower Could Mean a Fight With Intel For Chinese Server Market

itwbennett writes With AMD's fade out from the server market and the rapid decline of RISC systems, Intel has stood atop the server market all by itself. But now IBM, through its OpenPOWER Foundation, could give Intel and its server OEMs a real fight in China, which is a massive server market. As the investor group Motley Fool notes, OpenPOWER is a threat to Intel in the Chinese server market because the government has been actively pushing homegrown solutions over foreign technology, and many of the Foundation members, like Tyan, are from China.

Comments

Power is bigger than you think

[nhtshot]

I work on PPC systems every day. I also use several. I'd wager that you do as well.

Have cable or satellite TV? 90% chance it's using a Power cpu. Drive a car with fuel injection? 65% chance your engine is run by Power, 90% chance something in the car is (ABS, nav, transmission).

It's been around a long time (30+ years), been 64 bit much longer than x86 or ARM, has good OS support and good compilers.

I work on and like ARM as well, but if IBM can make a value proposition in China with PPC, they actually have a chance at getting some market share outside embedded.

never

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh.

IBM will NEVER win over local Chinese manufacturers, in China. This summary is a pipe dream, if true. The Chinese always, every time, 100% prefer domestic. Their people do, their Government does, their companies do, their culture does.

Put another way, if IBM and a Chinese manufacturer have the same tech, IBM will *never ever ever* be able to use that to make *any* inroads into China. None. Zero. Ziltch.

Frankly, Intel has more chance of making inroads, if they have something the Chinese DO NOT have domestically. And, CAN NOT sell (due to courts doing stop-sales) in other countries!

This is actually a WIN for Intel, and a LOSS for IBM in China!

Why?

Because IBM will sell 0, and Intel may sell > 0.

Re: Tell me about POWER and IBM.

[belrick]

I've been working with AIX since 1990. Prior to that a bit of SunOS. AIX is is different but generally well thought out. Most people who hate it simply aren't used to the differences. Lots of feature that we take for granted in today's Linux existed in AIX 25 years ago.

Tivoli Storage Manager is a dream. I remember setting up a high-availability TSM (well, ADSM at the time) server and having a client backup running during fail over testing. Client connection failed, continued retrying until the server was back up on the other node, then the backup continued where is left off. Transaction backup with rollback and resumption after server fail over! Try that with NetBackup or Networker or Avamar or CommVault.

B

Re:Keyword: *SOFTWARE*

[Bert64]

The POWER architecture has been around longer than X64, the vast majority of linux software comes with source code and compiles fine on power (and arm, mips and anything else) so it doesn't matter what the underlying processor is. A lot of the software that doesn't come with source these days is java based, which will run just fine on power too.

Except for a small number of fairly niche apps, most linux based server loads will work fine on a power system.