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by 34679 - Yep, it's wood.by carabiner
- Oh is that why the page is like 50 megs.by edflsafoiewq
- 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
- Those takes are wrong with or without this particular processor.
- 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.by wmf
- well that's nonsense. IBM does incredibly cool stuff.by petcat
- There are already microcontrollers that have both arm + riscv support. This isn't something insane.by vablings
- 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.
by Nursie - To be fair, IBM did this in the 90s with the PowerPC 615, which had PowerPC and x86 decoders on the same core.by monocasa
- 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).
by pavlov - I was curious, is it conceptually similar to Data General Fountainhead project?by markus_zhang
- If 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.by stonogo
- why is IBM moving forward that wayby SeifHashish
- Because ARM is the future.by wmf
- "AI acceleration for in transaction fraud detection", sounds interesting but also quite risky. Is it just a generic inference accelerator or something more exotic?by _joel
- It’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.
by trollbridge - Is this like the Transmeta processors doing code translation in hardware?by christkv
- They were pretty clear at Hot Chips that it's nativeby stonogo
- Transmeta 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.by LoganDark
- No, this is more like any modern processor, which translates instruction codes into micro-ops. To over-simplify IBM just has two of these units per thread rather than one.by bryanlarsen
- Huh. ARM instead of ppc64le?by avhception
- ARM 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.
by rbanffy - This 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.
- ARM can emulate z workloads. https://hercules-390.github.io/html/index.html
(or QEMU, for partition level emulation).
by stinkbeetle - I 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.
by nxobject - Not even the weirdest thing IBM did to get compatibility between their mainframes and other CPU architectures. To build the XT/370 and AT/370 expansion cards, they custom-ordered modified 68000s that decoded System/370 instructions instead of the 68k instruction set, with most of the instructions handled by the new microcode and the few stragglers software-emulated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PC-based_IBM_main...
by bitwize - The 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.by userbinator
- Old 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?
by bobmcnamara - It 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
by wmf