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IBM Unveils Next Generation Dual-Architecture Processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE
- crmd 2mo agoI was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
- vablings 2mo agoThere are already microcontrollers that have both arm + riscv support. This isn't something insane.
- dmitrygr 2mo agoRP2350 has separate cores for that. This is one core that speaks both.
- bmitc 2mo agoTo my understanding, the RP2350 has two ARM cores and two RISC-V cores, the two pairs are separate, and only one architecture can be used at a time on the chip.
- dmitrygr 2mo agonope. two "slots", each selectable from {ARM, RISCV}. In each, you pick one. so you can configure it at two arm cores, arm + riscv, or two riscv cores. dual-arch is possible, if you desire it
- bmitc 2mo agoThanks, and yea, you're right. Their top-level copy muddies the waters on this and makes it sound like what I wrote, but indeed, from their datasheet: > 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.
- porridgeraisin 2mo agoThose takes are wrong with or without this particular processor.
- pavlov 2mo agoMore like mid-2000s, even with the least charitable interpretation. There was a time when IBM dominated console CPUs for a massively successful generation (PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii).
- Retric 2mo agoXbox 360 used an Intel CPU. 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.
- rbanffy 2mo ago> Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
- Retric 2mo agoWow, you’re right. 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?
- to11mtm 2mo agoI'm guessing that they were safe in that it was more or less a 'codename' for a specific product's CPU that nobody else could buy, versus a product out on the market, left enough clear separation to avoid Trademark complaints. The combined might of IBM and Microsoft's legal teams, even (possibly even moreso?) then, was better than Intel's to be sure.
- rbanffy 2mo agoNot even the DoJ could make Microsoft bend its knee.
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- petcat 2mo agowell that's nonsense. IBM does incredibly cool stuff. https://research.ibm.com/blog https://research.ibm.com/blog
- hnthrow10282910 2mo agoYah it’s a bit wild. I had an internship there 10 years ago. The tech was fine (same shit you see at any tech company). The vibe however was just like — wow this place was probably cool 50 years ago
- rbanffy 2mo agoTheir research is usually behind paywalls. I miss the days when they published their journals and made PDFs available for download.
- bmitc 2mo agoWhat does IBM actually do? I just can never understand their business and operating model. It seems like they just do a bunch of random stuff and sell to the most enterprisey of enterprises.
- pram 2mo agoMuch like Oracle, they extract money from companies trapped on Db2
- ksec 2mo ago>What does IBM actually do? 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.
- monocasa 2mo agoTo be fair, IBM did this in the 90s with the PowerPC 615, which had PowerPC and x86 decoders on the same core.
- rbanffy 2mo agoBut those ARM and s390x decoders have a “Telum III” architecture behind them with a cache that’s pretty innovative. IBM has never stopped innovating. It’s just that most people can’t afford their machines.
- monocasa 2mo agoYeah, their cache work is undeniably really cool. 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.
- rbanffy 2mo agoEven though their CPUs are insanely fast, the real power of mainframes is in their IO. The amount of data you can push through those machines is absolutely mind blowing.
- bitwize 2mo agoHistorically this was because each I/O "channel" was a separate computer that handled the actual communication with the device, be it a terminal, disk, tape drive, card reader, printer, etc. and exchange data with the CPU via DMA. This allowed mainframe CPUs, which in the past weren't particularly fast, to handle huge workloads involving hundreds or thousands of users. These days, even commodity computers get blazing fast I/O to bus mastering devices. Where the mainframes win today is on reliability, built-in redundancy, hot-pluggability and expandability of components (you can just plug in CPUs, memory, disks, and network interfaces as long as you can afford them with the machine still running), and service and support. (Mainframes phone home immediately if they detect problems and an IBM service person will be on site the same day to fix it.)
- wmf 2mo agoThe z mainframe team does good technical work but then the high price cancels out all the value of that work. I'm not sure if that counts as innovation or not.
- tempest_ 2mo agoAt this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? 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.
- theandrewbailey 2mo agoSomeone has to be buying mainframes. Otherwise, there's no point in continuing to develop them. Shareholders would revolt.
- wmf 2mo agoThe existing 1,000 customers replace their old mainframes with newer models.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoThey are mostly leased, I think.
- rbanffy 2mo agoI don't think that's the case anymore.
- rbanffy 2mo ago> At this point no one is buying into mainframes are they? 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).
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Nursie 2mo agoI was one of them, but I don't think IBM hasn't innovated, my contention is more that they have de-emphasised software and hardware in favour of services, and they've moved away from consumer-facing activity to be entirely B2B, and that there is an overall feeling of slow decline. 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.
- flomo 2mo agoYeah, a huge chunk of IBM's service revenue has always been effectively mainframe services, with wall street accounting spin. 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.)
- christkv 2mo agoIs this like the Transmeta processors doing code translation in hardware?
- LoganDark 2mo agoTransmeta did code translation with a software JIT. The hardware side had specific support for x86 semantics, similar to how Apple's M-series has supporting hardware for Rosetta's AOT translation, but neither executes x86 machine code directly.
- stonogo 2mo agoThey were pretty clear at Hot Chips that it's native
- pulse7 2mo ago"code translation in hardware" microcode is called "native"
- wahern 2mo agoYep. All modern Intel and AMD architectures, save maybe some Atom variants, effectively JIT compile the incoming instructions. It's part of the reason the faster-than-static Java/JVM promises never came to fruition. The goal posts moved after the mainstream chips coopted the approach, in a sense, and they continue to move as pipelines get deeper and broader and transistor count goes up. Transmeta was a classic failure--right idea, wrong place & time.
- to11mtm 2mo agoEh? Intel and AMD were more or less 'Jitting' since the PPro and K5, and that's ignoring NexGen's Nx586 (which was shipping in hardware about a year before the PPro). All of them are way before Transmeta shipped a CPU. Where Transmeta tried to innovate was by using VLIW rather than a RISC-like core, along with their other special tech (Which they later licensed to lots of companies, including Intel,) to provide reasonable mobile performance with a low power draw. Oh, there's also the bit where Transmeta CMS is much more software based (likely, partially to push enough to software and avoid an x86 CPU license lawsuit) but even modern Intel chips AFAIK are still doing more translation on the CPU layer.
- markus_zhang 2mo agoI was curious, is it conceptually similar to Data General Fountainhead project?
- stonogo 2mo agoIf by that you are asking whether it has a dynamic ISA controllable at runtime, it appears not. This looks to be a Z processor with arm instructions implemented.
- markus_zhang 2mo agoOh I see, thanks!
- classichasclass 2mo agoThis feels like a baby step towards Arm being able to emulate z/Arch workloads, maybe with a bit of secret sauce for certain specific operations, which doesn't seem very much like IBM.
- nxobject 2mo agoI thought about that, too. I think they’re doing this for the same reason IBM has supported Linux LPARs: since a lot of customers who lease System/z currently probably get overprovisioned hardware that they’ll never fully use, why not try a last-ditch attempt to sell the excess capacity as ARM LPARs? Now you’re thinking like a Big Blue sales rep.
- rbanffy 2mo agoIIRC, they had different licensing prices for cores that would run z/OS workloads and cores that would run Linux on s390x (and other tier for Java, I think). This looks like they’ll have one for Linux on ARM as well.
- stinkbeetle 2mo agoARM can emulate z workloads. https://hercules-390.github.io/html/index.html https://hercules-390.github.io/html/index.html (or QEMU, for partition level emulation).
- jasomill 2mo agoSure. And you can run ARM workloads under QEMU on s390x Linux.
- stinkbeetle 2mo agoSure. And you can run ARM workloads in hardware ARM mode.
- CountHackulus 2mo agoThere's also the poorly advertised IBM-native S390 emulator. I worked on it over a decade ago, you could run S390 on PPC and X86 offically, and ARM and a few others were unofficial.
- avhception 2mo agoHuh. ARM instead of ppc64le?
- rbanffy 2mo agoARM has better software support for AI applications and half of their presentation was about their inference accelerators that can go in the mainframes (and POWER machines). IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits. Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.
- avhception 2mo agoAt least back in the day, there was talk about Nvidia + ppc64le. Wasn't there even a supercomputer with that setup? But I guess that has fallen by the wayside.
- rbanffy 2mo agoYes. There was a generation of POWER that offered NVLink.
- shrimppersimmon 2mo agoIn 2019 the two fastest machines in the world, Summit & Sierra (see top500.org) used ppc64le + Nvidia GPUs.
- __lm__ 2mo agoWe have some older Power9 with NVIDIA V100. Nvidia drivers stopped a while ago (before V100 were considered “old” also for x86_64). The main problem is software support by most machine learning libraries. While it is normal to have to compile many things from source when the binary is not provided even by some third party, in some cases the software will not compile on ppc64le and surely is not tested to work.
- 34679 2mo agoRight click -> Open image in new tab -> zoom in If you haven't already.
- edflsafoiewq 2mo agoOh is that why the page is like 50 megs.
- carabiner 2mo agoYep, it's wood.
- SeifHashish 2mo agowhy is IBM moving forward that way
- wmf 2mo agoBecause ARM is the future.
- bonzini 2mo agoMostly because big endian is the past.
- rbanffy 2mo agoBecause their clients want to deploy Linux AI workloads directly on the mainframe to gain lower latencies and higher troughput and ARM has better library support than s390x. Half of the last two mainframe-dedicated Hot Chips presentations were about the Spyre inference accelerator. Every newer mainframe CPU also has a big inference accelerator built-in, which is accessible to ARM binaries at instruction-level latencies (and has dedicated s390x instructions).
- _joel 2mo agoSure, don't disagree, RISC-V has 10Gbit nic, 32GB, multi core machines available now. Software slower to get there but catching up quite quickly. Don't discount that too.
- userbinator 2mo agoThe article is quite short on details but I wonder if this is an ARM core that can also execute IBM Z, or the other way around; in other words, which ISA does it execute its first instruction at the reset vector? In that past I've worked on a conceptual design for an "x86+" CPU, which would start as a regular x86 but then be able to execute code of other architectures like ARM, MIPS, PPC, etc. isolated in their own code segments, similar to how V86 mode works.
- bobmcnamara 2mo agoOld Arm did something similar where you could transition between thumb and arm instruction sets dynamically. Looks like this one you choose the ISA per process? Per VM?
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo agoAnd Jazelle.
- dfox 2mo agoIBM's mainframes do not really have a reset vector, the CPU gets initialized by some external means into whatever state the OS expects and then the clock gets enabled, so that distinction is quite moot.
- wmf 2mo agoIt starts in z mode and can only run ARM code in VMs. start as a regular x86 but then be able to execute code of other architectures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Instruction_Set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Instruction_Set
- u1hcw9nx 2mo agoNot explained in the article: Every single physical core on the chip decodes and executes both s390x and Arm AArch64 instructions, dynamically switching between the two ISA modes and convert them into micro ops. Mode switching is hypervisor-driven. And those chips are fast. 5.7 Ghz 2nm node. For who: When you need to run Linux programs on high security, mission critical environment. Others should not care.
- chao- 2mo agoMore details from the presentation at Hot Chips available via STH: https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-z-and-linuxone-dual-isa-processor-and-ai-acceleration-at-hot-chips-2026/ https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-z-and-linuxone-dual-isa-pro...
- sylware 2mo agoSo why the 2nm x86 chips are clocked so low? Why couldn't they be 6GHz? x86_64 ISA did it again? That said IBM should add RISC-V support.
- BillStrong 2mo agoThe AMD Zen 6 line is targeting 7GHz in the upcoming releases, on 2nm, so......
- sylware 2mo agoLast time I read something about Zen6 it was 6GHz. So I guess the IBM stuff is "server slow" then. I wish RISC-V microarchitectures would get access to 2nm silicon processes, because RISC-V at 7GHz... yummy.
- BillStrong 2mo agoThere was a card just detailed on Hot Chips that used a whole bunch of RISC-V CPUs on 2nm to run at 1.8GHz, but really low power, for compute on a CXL card that could also have SSDs for cached storage. So, don't assume they would crank up the GHz.
- _joel 2mo ago"AI acceleration for in transaction fraud detection", sounds interesting but also quite risky. Is it just a generic inference accelerator or something more exotic?
- trollbridge 2mo agoIt’s a rebranding of ML which IBM has promoted for quite some time, used in a rather conventional fashion. AI does not always mean LLM.
- _joel 2mo agoI never said it did? ML has inference too, so...
- trollbridge 2mo agoWell, let's just say that Amex and Visa have been doing advanced fraud detection, using ML techniques, for years... and yes, some of that inside the z/TPF environment.
- john-frandsen 2mo ago[flagged]
- skissane 2mo ago20 years ago, IBM had their eCLipz initiative to unify z and POWER. What actually shipped was two different CPUs sharing some design, but some of the media reports on it made it sound like it may have originally been more ambitious-one CPU with two instruction sets. If that’s what it was, looks like they finally shipped it, just replacing POWER with ARM