While the Power8 processor has been available from IBM since April 2014, the chips were only rolled out in Big Blue’s biggest iron in October of that year and the company only ramped up its largest Power8 machines, the Power Systems E880, to their fully extended NUMA configurations last May. …
The earliest paper on Transactional Memory that can be found – Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for Lock-Free Data Structures – was written about twenty years ago. …
IBM did not just stake the future of its Power chip and the systems business on which it depends on the OpenPower Foundation, a consortium now with 160 members after more than two years of cultivation by Big Blue and its key early partners – Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Tyan. …
These are exciting times for the memory hierarchy in systems. New kinds of DRAM and non-volatile memories are becoming available to system architects to enhance the performance and responsiveness of the applications that run upon them. …
Since putting together the OpenPower Foundation two years ago, IBM and its partners have been working to get lower-cost Power8 machines into the field to better compete against the ubiquitous Xeon server platform. …
With the sale of its System x division to Lenovo Group last fall and the winding down of its BlueGene massively parallel computing line, IBM lost a lot of its market presence in the high performance computing space. …
This is not the first time that Big Blue has found itself the underdog in the datacenter, and it probably will not be the last time, either. …
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