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I was reading HN comments yesterday shitting on modern IBM for being a non tech consulting company that has not innovated since the mid nineties.
by crmd 1mo ago
I 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 1mo agoThere are already microcontrollers that have both arm + riscv support. This isn't something insane.
- dmitrygr 1mo agoRP2350 has separate cores for that. This is one core that speaks both.
- bmitc 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo agoThose takes are wrong with or without this particular processor.
- pavlov 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo ago> Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU. No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
- Retric 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo agoNot even the DoJ could make Microsoft bend its knee.
- 1mo ago
- petcat 1mo agowell that's nonsense. IBM does incredibly cool stuff. https://research.ibm.com/blog https://research.ibm.com/blog
- hnthrow10282910 1mo 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 1mo agoTheir research is usually behind paywalls. I miss the days when they published their journals and made PDFs available for download.
- bmitc 1mo 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 1mo agoMuch like Oracle, they extract money from companies trapped on Db2
- ksec 1mo 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 1mo agoTo be fair, IBM did this in the 90s with the PowerPC 615, which had PowerPC and x86 decoders on the same core.
- rbanffy 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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_ 1mo 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 1mo agoSomeone has to be buying mainframes. Otherwise, there's no point in continuing to develop them. Shareholders would revolt.
- wmf 1mo agoThe existing 1,000 customers replace their old mainframes with newer models.
- SoftTalker 1mo agoThey are mostly leased, I think.
- rbanffy 1mo agoI don't think that's the case anymore.
- rbanffy 1mo 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 1mo ago[deleted]
- Nursie 1mo 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 1mo 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.)