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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

I could be wrong but I assume that there's enough inertia in the high-end business-to-business side of things (the part that matters for high-end server processors) that they probably can keep milking that cow for a few years more.

People who have only been buying Intel CPU in the last decade won't jump ship immediately. Nobody gets fired for buying Intel CPUs, at least until very recently. You know you won't have compatibility issues etc...

Of course within the next few years Intel will have to react somehow, either by outperforming AMD significantly to justify the premium or by slashing prices.

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I know I hope AMD can keep up the pressure and keep iterating.

I suspect anyone ordering top-bin CPU skus by the pallet-load has an ongoing program for evaluating performance-normalized TCO of at least a few candidate platforms based around a few candidate processors.

Heck, why has Google been investing heavily in OpenPOWER? I bet it's as much as keeping the option there and making it as attractive as possible: gives them a far stronger negotiating position with Intel.

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

Replace IBM with Intel for the 2010s version.

And yet there are still people out there buying IBM and somehow not getting fired for it.

Do you frequently see people getting fired for purchasing decisions?

Systems Engineer here;

Absolutely.

Good example is that we bought 1,000 servers, 256G memory, dual socket Xeon E5-2687w v4 etc;

The things didn't come with a TPM module and it was a business requirement to run:

A) Windows

B) Full Disk Encryption

TPM modules were not available to us in such quantities.

So, um, ... what happened to those now "useless" servers. Wondering for a friend ;-)

Available software constraints choices in many of those cases. Put two choices in front of an application team exec: rewrite and port an application from POWER/AIX, POWER/System i, POWER/System z for $X million, with all the attending risks that entails. Or spend same $X million on new IBM hardware, and get more capacity, performance, etc., while the system administrators/system programmers update the underlying OS, with lower magnitude of risks and impacts, and if the sysadmins screw up, that's another department, not yours, anyways. Even if porting is a one-time charge, and saves Y * $X million in N years (where N usually <5).

The choice to avoid risk is easy.

This is why, by the way, selling to C-suite, or above middle management, as much as it is hated in technical circles, is used. The higher you go in management, the more risk is able to be shouldered.

If Intel hypes up any AMD compatibility issues Intel can find, then that urge to avoid risk will play to Intel's advantage.

Port away from? We moved everything TO POWER/AIX.

If its not confidential, could I ask why? IBM has been pivoting POWER to Little-Endian and has been focusing more on Linux with Red-Hat, SUSE and now Ubuntu available.

Power is big iron reliable. if you can pay for it it likely pays off. Probably easier to manage a handful of million dollar Power/AIX setups than 1000s of servers.

I don't follow, this is the same POWER 'big iron' just running Linux instead of AIX.

The hardware is where the magic is not the software.

To complement siblings answer, there are several types of failures where PC hardware will just crash and burn, while POWER will just work as usual.

Yep, I've seen that, too. There are some use cases where IBM still excels. There is a popular perception that IBM is a has-been dinosaur, especially with the System z (mainframe) stuff, but I still haven't heard that Visa International has moved even one of their three world-wide super data centers off of that platform. The Linux world could avoid reinventing a lot of wheels in the future looking to the lessons IBM has publicly published about in the mainframe world. Even POWER/AIX is scoffed at in many Linux circles.

I've certainly seen my share of underutilized System p servers, but in the right hands, they're a powerful option, with features that Linux still hasn't caught up to yet. For a cool feature that I would love to see on Linux someday, peek at checkpoint-restart, which enables some really sweet capabilities [1]. Generally, anytime I hear a business tell me uptime reliability is nearly a blank-check requirement (when downtime losses are described in 5+ figures per minute and up, and it is a 24x7x365 operation), but they must still stay on a Unixen box because that is what their IT shop knows, and it's not a parallelizable application, I start looking in AIX's direction. It can be a right PITA to work with if you grew up with Linux or BSD, but once you figure out some add-ons to use, it gets much more pleasant to use.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-aix7.2.1-l...

I find sad that many aren't aware how many cool features are available in IBM and Unisys mainframes, still not available in mainstream computing.

The AS/400 (IBM i) and ClearPath are my favourites.

One with its TIMI architecture and kernel level JIT, the other with an history going back to the 60's using an almost memory safe systems programming language, while people are still debating how to replace C.

Is there an article that compares the features present in Power vs x86 and this almost memory safe language?

I don't touch Aix since 2003, but really enjoyed using it.

Just curious, do they still support the Windows/Symbian style of dynamic libraries, with import libraries?

Sometimes IBM are better than the alternative. Hard to believe in the HN bubble, I know, but there you are.

(The trick is not to end up buying a bunch of rubbish IBM products while you're getting the one you want.)

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