I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
PS3 used the Cell processor but it’s debatable how much that was an asset vs handicap. Total PlayStation sales dropped for that generation vs both PS2 and PS4. The manufacturing costs didn’t fall nearly as fast as expected and it was a poor fit in terms of cross platform development etc.
PS4 moved to AMD.
No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
Xeon vs Xenon
I had always assumed with chip names that similar it was an Intel product. How on earth didn’t they get sued?
The combined might of IBM and Microsoft's legal teams, even (possibly even moreso?) then, was better than Intel's to be sure.
We know about “Xenon” because they used the internal name outside the company. There’s zero difference between an unofficial and official branding when you’re using it in press releases.
IBM stopped building servers based on x86 because the margins were too thin for their tastes, but they never stopped building on top of POWER and Z.
For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that.
On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths.
I think the big 'X factor' though, was that, for as much pain as it caused AMD in the short term, (it's so easy to forget their 'malaise' era, i.e. Early Bulldozer and the GloFo split pains to their margins[1]), AMD made all the 'right' choices to let the console vendors have their cake and eat it too.
Namely, AMD was more than happy to do a custom core if there was a volume contract (similar to what IBM was willing to for the 360/GC/Wii) but also now had a capable, in-house GPU. (And thankfully had Bobcat as a stepping point towards Jaguar[2])
There's part of me that asks, if AMD had an ARM core, if we would have all Consoles powered by AMD chips now. Nintendo likely bought into Tegra because it was an ARM core, and for better or worse their mobile stuff by the time of making that choice had 15+ years of proven ARM success (GBA, DS, 3DS) behind it.
(See also, Intel in the 2010s scrambling with half-assed promises of integrating custom functionality or FPGAs with x86 cores.)
[0] - https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/
[1] - From what I recollect, the GloFo split and how the contracts were drawn up as far as their production, had a huge impact on their ability to produce due to yields and thermals, as well as the contracts for how GloFo got paid; it was at least part of them diversifying with TSMC as soon as they reasonably could.
[2] - As a Rant, I am pretty sure, if Jaguar had Desktop/Mobile versions that included a Dual channel DDR controller, they would have cleaned up on the low cost laptop market. I had one with, I think it was an A5000 or A5200, and for how tiny the battery was it could last wayyyy longer than any of the intel laptops I had for the time, but churned if you were doing memory heavy stuff.
Hell Nvidia was so desperate they did the whole Shield thing...
It's more than a theory. It's pretty much spelled out explicitly in The Race For A New Game Machine how salty not just Sony and Toshiba were in the broad sense, but also the Sony and Toshiba engineers that the IBM team worked with felt pretty betrayed.
AMD worked on a ARM core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12 but I'm not sure it would had work, they were never the best on the power consumption, so I'm not sure it would have been a good choice for the Switch.
IBM has never stopped innovating. It’s just that most people can’t afford their machines.
That being said I think it's a natural consequence of the difference between a mainframe and commodity servers. A mainframe is going to be running pretty disparate workloads simultaneously, so it makes sense to steal from your neighbor if they aren't using their cache. Whereas it's more likely that a commodity server is just running the same server on each core, and if you have a different workload, you pick a different shape of server to run it on. There are pros and cons to both.
I do wonder about the spectre consequences of borrowing cache lines from other cores though.
Mere mortals such as me, have to make do with cloud-based clusters where the IO is distributed across multiple machines connected by very fast interconnects, but they don't behave as a single machine, nor have the IO always accessible at local bus speeds.
> Mainframes phone home immediately if they detect problems and an IBM service person will be on site the same day to fix it.
The joke usually went like this: technician shows up to fix the machine, operator says "We didn't call you", to what the technician answers "You didn't. Your computer did"
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-2024-main...
Their hardware advances are real, Power chips are still excellent and IBM's mainframes are pretty unique, but the niche for both of those seems less relevant over time and some of this stuff looks to me like hype-work to keep the name relevant while the leadership place ever more emphasis on enterprise services and consultancy.
Maybe I'm wrong, but they aren't a company that get mentioned in the same breath as Microsoft, Google, Nvidia or Apple, not any more.
I suspect that almost zero companies adopted mainframes after 1980 or so, so it's ALL legacy market. However, IBM always invests a lot of money in hardware to keep the mainframe perceptually leading edge and "sexy", so they can hold-on to those customers. So you gotta give them credit for that.
(IBM and Microsoft were always 'in the same breath' for years, Microsoft totally out-smarted them, and IBM gave up on that.)
> The ARCHSEL register has one bit for each processor socket, so it is possible to request mixed combinations of Arm and RISC-V processors: either Arm core 0 and RISC-V core 1, or RISC-V core 0 and Arm core 1.
> Practical applications for this are limited, since this requires two separate program images. The two cores interoperate normally, including shared exclusives via the global monitor: a shared variable can be safely, concurrently accessed by an Arm processor performing ldrex, strex instructions and a RISC-V processor performing amoadd.w instructions, for example.
> Hardware supports debugging for a mixture of Arm and RISC-V processors, though this may prove challenging on the host software side. Debug resources for unused processors are dynamically marked as non-PRESENT in the top-level CoreSight ROM table.
You should dive into the topic of Mainframe. There are a lot of financial transaction to other critical infrastructure are dependent on it. And not just because of backward compatibility but technical superiority.
So they are just selling to the existing pool of users for which the price just has to come in under the cost/risk of rewriting all their ancient stuff.
If you want to be a high-volume consumer bank (insurance is similar - it's about processing a high volume of transactions), you have few alternatives. You can get a couple mainframes (you should place them in different datacenters), with their extreme reliability and stability, or you can build your infrastructure with commodity distributed systems, but then you'll need to build the same level of reliability out of your unreliable components. Current solutions are getting really good at that, but it's your job to integrate them. In the end, it's not really a matter of how much money you spend, but how you spend it - the numbers will closely match.
Regulators don't really care how you do it, as long as you don't fail to provide adequate guarantees to your customers (banking is extremely regulated, and customers are well protected).
Most of the existing ones already have mainframes because they were early adopters.
If the consumer segment started to develop a sense that their payment cards were glitchy or unreliable, our economy could suffer real consequences. Error free, secure, instant payment experiences are essential. Go visit a local grocery store and measure how long it takes to authorize a transaction each time a card is presented to the terminal. Pay special attention to how fast the Visa and American Express networks are. At my local Kroger the terminal and network setup is so fast that you can use the chip reader almost like a mag stripe reader.
https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...