If you need a big, badass box that can support tens of terabytes of memory, dozens of PCI-Express peripheral slots, thousands of directly attached storage devices, all feeding into hundreds of cores that can span that memory footprint with lots of bandwidth, you do not have a lot of options. …
If memory bandwidth is holding back the performance of some of your applications, and there is something that you can do about it other than to just suffer. …
Here is a simple algebraic equation that describes the relative computing oomph of two different CPU architectures over the past two decades: If Intel an X86 core is X, then an IBM Power core equals 2X. …
Back in early July, we covered the launch of IBM’s entry and midrange Power10 systems and mused about how Big Blue could use these systems to reinvigorate an HPC business rather than just satisfy the needs of the enterprise customers who run transaction processing systems and are looking to add AI inference to their applications through matrix math units on the Power10 chip. …
By all accounts, Big Blue had a pretty good quarter ending in June, with sales of its System z16 mainframes skyrocketing upwards as they do every couple of years at the beginning of a new cycle and sales of its high-end Power10 machines also getting some traction. …
The “Cirrus” Power10 processor from IBM, which we codenamed for Big Blue because it refused to do it publicly and because we understand the value of a synonym here at The Next Platform, shipped last September in the “Denali” Power E1080 big iron NUMA machine. …
In the next few months, Big Blue will launch its entry and midrange Power10 servers, and to be blunt, we are not sure what the HPC and AI angle is going to be for these systems. …
All of the commercial platform creators in the world, since the dawn of time, which arguably started in the enterprise in April 1964 with the advent of the System/360 mainframe, wants the same things. …
Starting way back in the late 1980s, when Sun Microsystems was on the rise in the datacenter and Hewlett Packard was its main rival in Unix-based systems, market forces compelled IBM to finally and forcefully field its own open systems machines to combat Sun, HP, and others behind the Unix movement. …
While we are big fans of distributed computing systems here at The Next Platform, we never forget our heritage in big iron. …
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