The Most Powerful Server Embiggens a Bit with Power11 | Hacker News Reader

The Most Powerful Server Embiggens a Bit with Power11

nextplatform.com

28 pointsrbanffy15 comments

AIX on big iron.

Used for ex nightly batch processing at banks. Lots of horse power for your on prem needs. Moving this kind of horse power to the cloud would be insanely expensive and complex for the mid size banks relying on these systems.

They shipped these massive boxes out and connected them to massive SANs. You could license the processors later if your workload grew.

I spent a year as consultant to big customers building SOA, websites, SSO for whatever they needed. ATM networks with low latency etc.

They came with avcertain number of power cores, say 8 but you could start by only licensing 4 and then grow into them. Don't remember the exact specs on this but they were crazy powerful 20 years ago.

Just starting into a project to move an AIX behemoth to Linux, with clouds (still far) ahead. Fingers crossed...

better coverage at https://chipsandcheese.com/p/ibm-power-whats-next?utm_source...

Embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word!

ive just read thats actually become a word in dictionaries now

Can confirm that 'cromulent' is in the Oxford English Dictionary [0] ...

>> Acceptable, adequate, satisfactory.

>> Frequently used humorously or ironically in recognition of its origin as an invented word in the television programme The Simpsons (see quot. 1996).

As is 'embiggen', namely 'transitive. To make bigger or greater, to enlarge.'

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cromulent_adj?tab=meaning_and...

True

And it's a shame they used it incorrectly in the title - "embiggen" means "enlarge, make bigger", not "become bigger" which is the case with Power11

Ahhh okay I was so confused reading the title...I was like "Huh, what do they mean by they made a 'bit' larger? As in a byte...?"

Very confusing title...

I'm genuinely surprised, I thought the release of the Telum chip signed the death of the POWER processors.

Are they meant to be two different tiers of mainframe processors?

The mainframe is System Z. The power line is meant to replace things like Windows Servers and EC2 instances.

You would typically install software like your CRM, ERP and web servers on the IBM Power systems. These would then talk to the mainframe (System Z / Telum) to handle any extremely high stakes business activity.

A healthy all-in IBM organization would be using both of these technologies for what they're best suited for. If you run salesforce and your GH enterprise instance on the mainframe, you are going to be spending a LOT of money compared to the alternative.

I think the best way to differentiate POWER from Z is that POWER is all about raw performance (which is why you see it in HPC) while Z is all about security and availability for commercial on-line transaction processing. POWER10 and 11 are very close to each other, with the same overall design and fabrication process (both 7nm).

The other side of POWER is IBMi (the heir to the AS/400 platform). It is an incredibly interesting take on the whole operating system concept, possibly even more alien than z/OS is for people who grew up on Unix. It feels a bit like an image-based system like Smalltalk, but taken to the extreme.

I hope POWER12 inherits some of Telum’s cache goodness. IBM should be talking a bit about POWER12 at this year’s Hot Chips conference.

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

"...the utter dependence that customers...have on these boxes..." is less technical than contractual.

What they were providing sounded fairly niche in the Chipsandcheese interview. Terabytes of DRAM on an entirely different protocol than DDR (less "stressed" with robust interconnects and a higher signal integrity - which I would assume necessarily comes with a higher cost for boards and silicon real estate), strongly parallel and specifically designed to improve signal quality/reroute around bad connections, and generally hyper focus on uptime for mission critical massive in memory databases.

I've never understood why these processors really exist before, but I think that makes sense.

The traditional Z mainframes (focused on uptime to the point where everything is hot swappable while running and redundant) I did understand as probably having some valid use deep inside the financial system and defense, but the enterprise facing solutions like power I never really got.

Anyway if anyone has more to add I'd like to hear it. Is my first paragraph mostly it?

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