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Comment by victor106 | Hacker News Reader

Keep hearing that IBM makes these incredible chips but don’t see anyone using IBM chips. What do they do with them?

Approximately everyone (at least in the F500) outside of Big Tech uses them. For example, Costco's entire inventory management system runs on IBM i (so, POWER). You can see the classic terminal look around the store. Banks run a TON of z and i. You'll never see them because they're essentially always in data centers, but I guarantee you interact with them even if it's very non-obvious because there's 50 microservices between the UI and the actual system of record.

And some of those i and z systems have some obscene engineering in them. I cannot find it now but i remember seeing a cross section of their 40 layer PCB simply so they could get more memory/IO performance to the CPU. POWER may have dropped out of the consumer space but it still has a vital place in servers.

Ericsson used a lot of power chips in their telecom hardware 10 years ago at least, haven't worked with their stuff since then so I haven't kept up.

Their line of POWER chips are used in their mainframes

No, their mainframes use the zArch which goes back to the System/360 from 1964.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

IBM sells huge servers with POWER architecture CPUs but they are not what people are referring to when they talk about IBM mainframes.

Ah, thanks for the correction.

The product here is the research and licensing the tech.

usgov

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