Comment by crmd
8 hours 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.
8 hours 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.
More 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).
It's a little more complex than that, IMO.
For starters, IBM did also do the CPU for the GameCube, and that was likely a part of the Wii using an upgraded PPC arch for that.
On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths.
I think the big 'X factor' though, was that, for as much pain as it caused AMD in the short term, (it's so easy to forget their 'malaise' era, i.e. Early Bulldozer and the GloFo split pains to their margins[1]), AMD made all the 'right' choices to let the console vendors have their cake and eat it too.
Namely, AMD was more than happy to do a custom core if there was a volume contract (similar to what IBM was willing to for the 360/GC/Wii) but also now had a capable, in-house GPU. (And thankfully had Bobcat as a stepping point towards Jaguar[2])
There's part of me that asks, if AMD had an ARM core, if we would have all Consoles powered by AMD chips now. Nintendo likely bought into Tegra because it was an ARM core, and for better or worse their mobile stuff by the time of making that choice had 15+ years of proven ARM success (GBA, DS, 3DS) behind it.
(See also, Intel in the 2010s scrambling with half-assed promises of integrating custom functionality or FPGAs with x86 cores.)
[0] - https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-360/
[1] - From what I recollect, the GloFo split and how the contracts were drawn up as far as their production, had a huge impact on their ability to produce due to yields and thermals, as well as the contracts for how GloFo got paid; it was at least part of them diversifying with TSMC as soon as they reasonably could.
[2] - As a Rant, I am pretty sure, if Jaguar had Desktop/Mobile versions that included a Dual channel DDR controller, they would have cleaned up on the low cost laptop market. I had one with, I think it was an A5000 or A5200, and for how tiny the battery was it could last wayyyy longer than any of the intel laptops I had for the time, but churned if you were doing memory heavy stuff.
> On the flipside, there is the theory (I think even Copetti brings it up in their XBox 360 Architecture breakdown [0]) that IBM using the Cell PPE for the 360's tri-cores left a sour taste in Toshiba, but more-so Sony's mouths.
It's more than a theory. It's pretty much spelled out explicitly in The Race For A New Game Machine how salty not just Sony and Toshiba were in the broad sense, but also the Sony and Toshiba engineers that the IBM team worked with felt pretty betrayed.
Intel did release a few generations of their Xeons with an Arria built in but it's been a couple years since the last release. It's a cool idea but I think all the money dried up quick once the AI boom started. Plus they spun off Altera so I doubt they'll be doing it again.
I think Nintendo used Tegra because it was super cheap. AMD has access to the same ARM cores as everyone else (see Seattle and Sound Waves) but a semi-custom chip would have been more expensive than an overstocked Tegra.
1 reply →
Having a presence in the consumer market is not a requirement for being innovative.
IBM stopped building servers based on x86 because the margins were too thin for their tastes, but they never stopped building on top of POWER and Z.
Xbox 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.
> Xbox 360 used an Intel CPU.
No. It was a PowerPC based one called, IIRC, Xenon.
7 replies →
To be fair, IBM did this in the 90s with the PowerPC 615, which had PowerPC and x86 decoders on the same core.
But 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.
Yeah, 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.
4 replies →
The 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.
At 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.
Someone has to be buying mainframes. Otherwise, there's no point in continuing to develop them. Shareholders would revolt.
1 reply →
They are mostly leased, I think.
A single mainframe can handle workloads that would take dozens of x86 cloud servers, with nine nines of uptime. If you can afford it it pays for itself in terms of reliability and scalability.
That may be true but the dozens of x86 servers are cheaper and easier to use.
There are already microcontrollers that have both arm + riscv support. This isn't something insane.
RP2350 has separate cores for that. This is one core that speaks both.
To 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.
1 reply →
I 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.
Yeah, 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.)
well that's nonsense. IBM does incredibly cool stuff.
https://research.ibm.com/blog
What 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.
Much like Oracle, they extract money from companies trapped on Db2
Their research is usually behind paywalls. I miss the days when they published their journals and made PDFs available for download.
[dead]
Those takes are wrong with or without this particular processor.