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I'm genuinely surprised, I thought the release of the Telum chip signed the death of the POWER processors. Are they meant to be two different tiers of mainfram

• bob1029 1y ago
  The mainframe is System Z. The power line is meant to replace things like Windows Servers and EC2 instances. You would typically install software like your CRM, ERP and web servers on the IBM Power systems. These would then talk to the mainframe (System Z / Telum) to handle any extremely high stakes business activity. A healthy all-in IBM organization would be using both of these technologies for what they're best suited for. If you run salesforce and your GH enterprise instance on the mainframe, you are going to be spending a LOT of money compared to the alternative.
  • rbanffy 1y ago
    I think the best way to differentiate POWER from Z is that POWER is all about raw performance (which is why you see it in HPC) while Z is all about security and availability for commercial on-line transaction processing. POWER10 and 11 are very close to each other, with the same overall design and fabrication process (both 7nm). The other side of POWER is IBMi (the heir to the AS/400 platform). It is an incredibly interesting take on the whole operating system concept, possibly even more alien than z/OS is for people who grew up on Unix. It feels a bit like an image-based system like Smalltalk, but taken to the extreme. I hope POWER12 inherits some of Telum’s cache goodness. IBM should be talking a bit about POWER12 at this year’s Hot Chips conference.