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It must be fun being a hardware engineer for IBM mainframes: Cost constraints for your designs can be mostly be left aside, as there's no competition, and your
by elzbardico 1y ago
It must be fun being a hardware engineer for IBM mainframes: Cost constraints for your designs can be mostly be left aside, as there's no competition, and your still existing customers have been domesticated to pay you top dollar every upgrade cycle, and frankly, they don't care.
Cycle times are long enough so you can thoroughly refine your design.
Marketing pressures are probably extremely well thought, as anyone working on Mainframe marketing is probably either an ex-engineer or almost an engineer by osmosis.
And the product is different enough from anything else, that you can try novel ideas, but not different enough that your design skills are useless elsewhere, and you can't leverage other's advancement idea.
- erk__ 1y agoThere is also no other place that will just implement conversions between utf formats, compression in hardware or various hashed and other crypto in hardware like they do.
- Philpax 1y agoI'm pretty sure that at least a few of those are implemented in modern x86 / ARM CPUs? As an immediate example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set
- oasisaimlessly 1y agoAnother, introduced around the same time (SHA instruction set): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_instruction_set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA_instruction_set
- erk__ 1y agoYeah there are some of those, but IBM has stuff like Ed25519 signatures, x86 at least seems to be a bit on the back foot when it comes to implementing things like that. They will probably rather wait until AES is popular before they add it.
- sillywalk 1y agoNitpick: the SPARC M7/M7 have hardware compression.
- erk__ 1y agoThat is very cool I had no idea, seems like it is also in the newer T8/M8 according to this whitepaper: https://www.oracle.com/dk/a/ocom/docs/sparc-t8-m8-server-architecture.pdf https://www.oracle.com/dk/a/ocom/docs/sparc-t8-m8-server-arc...
- pezezin 1y agoModern consoles provide hardware decompression to transfer compressed assets from the NVME directly to the GPU. Similar functionality is coming to PCs in the form of DirectStorage and Vulkan extensions.
- erk__ 1y agoYeah the newest PlayStation have a hardware implementation of Oodle which is really cool. Z/Arch have a inflate/deflate implementation which makes it a bit more general than the texture decompression.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoHardware decompression can increase overall processing performance over uncompressed data because I/o is slow. Heck even without hardware decompression it is often faster. Considering mainframe sweet spot is I/o processing, not surprising.
- bgnn 1y agoThey fund a lot of R&D in house and let people try crazy new ideas. Too bad it's just for a niche product. They have a famous networking (optical and wireline) group doing a lot of state-of-the-art research, and they deploy these in their mainframe products. There's no other company like it. They are, in a sense, exact opposite of Apple where all HW engineers are pushed for impossible deadlines and solutions that save the day. Most in house developed IP is then not competitive enough and at the end doesn't end up in production (like their generations of 5G modems and the IPs in these like data converters etc).
- rbanffy 1y ago> Cost constraints for your designs can be mostly be left aside, as there's no competition I don’t think they neglect the migration of workloads to cloud platforms. Mainframes can only cost so much before it’s cheaper to migrate the workloads to other platforms and rewrite some SLAs. They did a ton of work on this generation to keep power envelope in the same ballpark of the previous generation, because that’s what their clients were concerned about.