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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.
So, is IBM going to ditch making their own POWER pSeries, and totally go for the ARM model of just licensing the technology for OpenPOWER . . . ?
Just like in the PC world, folks stopped buying IBM built PCs, when cheap clones were available. What would be the advantage of buying an IBM built OpenPOWER system, as opposed to a much cheaper Chinese built clone . . . ? Maybe the IBM system will have some kind of "secret sauce" . . . ? Like a MicroChannel (har, har).
At any rate, somebody is going to have to invest a lot of money to make sure that Linux runs well on OpenPOWER, in order for this to succeed.
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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.
The Mill architecture is around the corner now, and promises immense potential. It elegantly addresses many deficiencies of conventional architectures, and enables substantially increased efficiency while also simplifying system software and compilers. It is a fascinating and compelling design, which re-abstracts the hardware and software in a fundamentally superior way.
While the Alpha is a nice RISC design, at heart it is more similar to an x86 than not. The paradigm introduced by the Mill architecture is a world apart.
Yep. In my career, I've seen the rise and fall of RISC (on both Windows and *NIX), Apple's transition between several chip families, Sun's Sparc chips and even Intel trying to out-Intel with Itanium. You get hit with major roadblocks as well as death by a thousand cuts. It's extremely difficult to get it working in the first place, and then ongoing maintenance is no small feat, either.
I wonder if the Chinese government is "strongly favoring home grown solutions" with an ongoing infusion of funding, to do they just pay it lip service? China is a huge emerging market that plenty of vendors are trying to sell into, if they are really serious about this, it could actually provide the catalyst to make the ports happen. But no demand in the marketplace means little incentive for anything to happen.
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
Actually, POWER8 supports both big and little endian, and you can go out to Canonical's site and (as of 14.04) and get the LE version of Ubuntu for POWER8. You can read about that below. Quoting the article:
- https://www.ibm.com/developerw...
Michael C. Hollinger
Uh what?
Last I heard AMD was going balls to the wall with an ARM server chip and 'Zen' server cores in Q1 2016.
Come to think of it, outside of GPUs, server chips are the only thing I've heard of that AMD's working on down the road.
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.
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MIPS ain't extinct.
They're about to enter the tablet market with a dual core SoC featuring a blazingly fast PowerVR GPU.
Performance looked a tad sluggizh but that's possibly Spidermonkey needing fine tuning for MIPS
Right, Intel x86 family doesn't win because it's better, but because it's a hassle to switch. Intel is good enough, nothing spectacular, no one will study x86 as a good example in CPU design courses, though I'm sure it will be taught by the faculty at business schools. MIPS and Sparc however will continue to be taught, PowerPC is still a better overall system design in every way. Even Intel is unable to climb out of the pit they are in with backwards compatibility, their own i860, i960, and Itanium chips failed not because they weren't superior designs but because they didn't have the backwards compatibility with a shitty design.
McDonald's is the number one restaurant in the world, but you don't hear the culinary world raving about how great they are. Why then does the x86 family maintain a set of fan boys?
AIX was pretty cool way back when, when they introduced 64-bit support. The processor was 64-bit. However, you could run a 32-bit kernel or a 64-bit kernel. And you could run a 32-bit process or a 64-bit process on either of the kernels.
So what does some poor chump (i.e. me) who is tasked with writing a device driver for AIX need to do? Well, first #ifdef the code, so you compile different stuff, depending on if you are building a 32-bit or 64-bit version of the device driver. Then you needed to add simple "if" statements in the device driver, to check if you were running a process in 32-bit or 64-bit mode. Then according to the mix, you would have to thunk the addresses, when copying the data from user space into kernel space.
Fun stuff. I can't believe that I actually did this in a former life . . .
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All Ubuntu packages run on it with 14.04. SUSE and Redhat also have LE distributions that run on OpenPOWER systems too Take it for a spin... http://osuosl.org/services/pow...