IBM Archive

At the Hot Chips 2010 conference, IBM announced their upcoming z196 CPU, which is really, really fast. How fast? Fastest chip in the world fast. Intended for Z-series mainframe computers, the Z196 has a clock speed of 5.2GHz. Measuring just 512 square millimeters, the Z196 is fabricated on 45nm PD SOI technology, and on its surface contains almost one and a half billion transistors. My... Processor is bigger than yours.

For only the second time since Big Blue entered the Unix market for real in February 1990 with the launch of the RS/6000 line of workstations and servers, the company is letting customers who use its Power-based servers take a future AIX release for a test drive in an open beta program

IBM has updated its System x iDataPlex servers to include graphics processors from Nvidia. The new servers are aimed at organizations that want to run scientific and commercial applications on graphics processors.

"IBM has radically improved the bang for the buck on its Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blade servers this week, and is expected to soon deliver similarly priced entry rack and tower servers. And now it has a new, lower-cost AIX 6.1 Express Edition that will match the less expensive hardware and therefore help Big Blue's AIX platform better compete against Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris alternatives. The new AIX Express Edition takes the special low-cost pricing that was available only on JS series blade servers and now makes it available across the Power Systems line, including logical partitions on the largest Power 595 (and before too long Power 595) servers."

And thus our true colours reveal. IBM made a patent pledge in 2005, promising not to sue open source projects over a list of 500 patents the computer giant holds. Today, however, IBM has threatened to sue TurboHercules, a French open source software house which provides support for the Hercules open source s390 mainframe emulator. Some of the patents in question are on the 500 list.

"The scuttlebutt is that IBM seemed perfectly content to wait until May to launch the Power7-based Power Systems servers, but something changed and compelled the company to move up the announcement of its first machines using the eight-core processor to today. Big Blue is not in a habit of explaining its motives or its timing for product launches, but it seems clear that IBM wanted to get out in front of a whole lot of processor and systems launches that are expected between now and the summer."

German website Heise Online has received confirmation that IBM is terminating its Cell processor line. This means that no future development will take place, making the PoweXCell 8i the last Cell processor. Parts of the Cell project will still make it into future processor designs, however.

"With the imminent release of Windows 7, IBM and Canonical are clasping hands to sell an Ubuntu Linux- and Lotus-based desktop package to US businesses targeting low-end PCs and netbooks. The duo initially launched their Ubuntu-powered IBM Client for Smart Work desktop bundle to Africa back in September. But IBM said it decided to swing the offering State-side due to demand from its partners."

"Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, 'Handelsblatt' reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM's in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past... IBM's management have obviously decided to practice what they preach. 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony, reports the newspaper. The motive for the migration appears not to be the saving of license fees, and according to an IBM press officer, the move is a clear statement in appreciation of open source standards."

With every new server processor generation, there is always the possibility that the chip and its associated chipsets and system components are so different that both the chip and the server platform have to change at the same time. This will not be the case for the Power7 processors due next year, says IBM.

The year 2008 will forever be remembered as the year of the off-the-shelf (OTS) supercomputer, thanks to the Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and IBM team that constructed the world's first machine (Roadrunner) to break the peta-FLOP (1,000,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second) barrier. Get an overview of OTS strategies to architect high-performance computing (HPC) systems as well as the methods and concepts behind building HPC systems from OTS components and open source software.

The struggle within companies between their software and hardware business can lead to interesting co-opetition, and sometimes disaster. (A most extreme example being Sony's ignominious fall from the top the portable music device heap as a result of its reluctance to disturb its music production arm's legacy business). IBM, of course, is probably the canonical example, with its various partnerships with Microsoft ending up not only with Microsoft on top, but with its own PC hardware business suffering a long decline into oblivion as a result. Big Blue, presumably trying to avoid a replay, has entered into software licensing agreements with, among others, arch-rival Sun. Now, it seems they're backing off on plans to offer Solaris support for GPFS, their shared disk cluster file system.

IBM has released Lotus Symphony 1.2, with a beta release for Mac OS X. "Lotus Symphony release 1.2 is now available and includes Beta support for the Mac OS X platform in English. I know many of you have been waiting for this new platform and hope you will take the time to try it out and give us your feedback. We expect to have a Generally Available version for Mac in all the languages we support in 1Q09." You can get it from here.

IBM has marked its 10 years of participation in Linux and open source with an open source code contribution focused on supercomputing.