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Most impressive. I would enjoy an ELI5 for the market differences between commodity chips and these mainframe grade CPUs. Stuff like design, process, and suppl

Most impressive. I would enjoy an ELI5 for the market differences between commodity chips and these mainframe grade CPUs. Stuff like design, process, and supply chain, anything of interest to a general (nerd) audience. IBM sells 100s of Z mainframes per year, right? Each can have a bunch of CPUs, right? So Samsung is producing 1,000s of Telums per year? That seems incredible. Given such low volumes, that's a lot more verification and validation, right? Foundaries have to keep running to be viable, right? So does Samsung bang out all the Telums for a year in one burst, then switch to something else? Or do they keep producing a steady trickle? Not that this info would change my daily work or life in any way. I'm just curious. TIA.

detaro 1y ago
It's something they'll run a batch for occasionally, but thats normal. Fabs are not like one long conveyor belt where a wafer goes in at the front, passes through a long sequence of machines and falls out finished at the end. They work in batches, and machines need reconfiguring for the next task all the time (if a chip needs 20 layers, they don't have every machine 20 times), so mixing different products and having products is normal. Low-volume products are going to be more expensive of course due to per-batch setup tasks being spread over fewer wafers. In general scheduling of machine time and transportation of FOUPs (transport boxes for a number of wafers, the basic unit of processing) is a big topic in the industry, optimizing machine usage while keeping the number of unfinished wafers "in flight" and the overall cycle time low. It takes weeks for a wafer to flow through the fab.
- bob1029 1y ago
  It is non-trivial to swap between product designs in a fab. It can take many lots before you have statistical process controls dialed in to the point where yields begin to pick up. Prior performance is not indicative of future performance.
BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago
It's probably more on the order of a thousand or so mainframe systems delivered per year, based on average lifespan of one of these systems and the ~10,000 or so existing mainframe customers. Then you have to consider that each CPC drawer for a mainframe has 4 sockets. And there are multiple CPC drawers per maxed out system (I believe up to 4, so 16 sockets per mainframe). And some larger customers will have many mainframes setup in clusters for things like parallel sysplex and disaster recovery. So probably more on the order of ~10's of thousands of these chips getting sold per year. So definitely not high volume in CPU manufacturing terms. But it's not miniscule.
- Merrill 1y ago
  A good configuration is a pair of mainframes running parallel sysplex in two data centers on separate power and communications grids, with another pair more than 200 miles away for disaster recovery, and maybe a 5th in a single data center for more redundant data backup. Then you are set to do overnight runs to calculate where a few trillion dollars went that day.
iamwpj 1y ago
It's probably 100k in one run and then they are stored for future use.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  And since they can sell the machine fully configured, sales of single CPUs or drawers must not be a big thing. They will keep stock for replacements, but I agree we won't see them doing multiple batches often. By now they must be well into the development of the z18 and z19 processors. This year Hot Chips I'd expect them showing the next POWER and, in 2026, the next Z, hitting GA in 2027 or 2028.

detaro 1y ago

It's something they'll run a batch for occasionally, but thats normal. Fabs are not like one long conveyor belt where a wafer goes in at the front, passes through a long sequence of machines and falls out finished at the end. They work in batches, and machines need reconfiguring for the next task all the time (if a chip needs 20 layers, they don't have every machine 20 times), so mixing different products and having products is normal. Low-volume products are going to be more expensive of course due to per-batch setup tasks being spread over fewer wafers. In general scheduling of machine time and transportation of FOUPs (transport boxes for a number of wafers, the basic unit of processing) is a big topic in the industry, optimizing machine usage while keeping the number of unfinished wafers "in flight" and the overall cycle time low. It takes weeks for a wafer to flow through the fab.

bob1029 1y ago
It is non-trivial to swap between product designs in a fab. It can take many lots before you have statistical process controls dialed in to the point where yields begin to pick up. Prior performance is not indicative of future performance.

BugheadTorpeda6 1y ago

It's probably more on the order of a thousand or so mainframe systems delivered per year, based on average lifespan of one of these systems and the ~10,000 or so existing mainframe customers. Then you have to consider that each CPC drawer for a mainframe has 4 sockets. And there are multiple CPC drawers per maxed out system (I believe up to 4, so 16 sockets per mainframe). And some larger customers will have many mainframes setup in clusters for things like parallel sysplex and disaster recovery. So probably more on the order of ~10's of thousands of these chips getting sold per year. So definitely not high volume in CPU manufacturing terms. But it's not miniscule.

Merrill 1y ago
A good configuration is a pair of mainframes running parallel sysplex in two data centers on separate power and communications grids, with another pair more than 200 miles away for disaster recovery, and maybe a 5th in a single data center for more redundant data backup. Then you are set to do overnight runs to calculate where a few trillion dollars went that day.

iamwpj 1y ago

It's probably 100k in one run and then they are stored for future use.

rbanffy 1y ago
And since they can sell the machine fully configured, sales of single CPUs or drawers must not be a big thing. They will keep stock for replacements, but I agree we won't see them doing multiple batches often. By now they must be well into the development of the z18 and z19 processors. This year Hot Chips I'd expect them showing the next POWER and, in 2026, the next Z, hitting GA in 2027 or 2028.