[email protected] (McKown, John) writes: > Is the S/370? Well, yes and no. Just as the S/370 is now called the > "z", the AS/400 is now called the "i". And yes, it is still sold and > supported by IBM. It is no longer a "mini" type box either! It has > some very powerful processors (physically, the are Power > processors). They have an LPAR/PowerVM capability too.
AS/400 is follow-on to s/38 ... significantly simplified flavor of FS ... mentioned here: http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm 1980 ... company was going to converge the large variety of corporate/internal microprocessors to 801/risc with various iliad chips; 4331/4341 follow-on would be based on 801/risc; as/400 was going to be 801/risc; lots of others. for various reasons that didn't happen. 4381 was its own chip, 801/risc for as/400 was running into trouble ... and there was crash program to do a as/400 cisc chip. the follow-on to the displaywriter was going to be the 801/risc ROMP chip. when that project got killed, the group looked around for some other market and hit on the unix workstation market. the ROMP chip was tweaked and the company, that did the unix port for PC/IX, was hired to do AIX. then a new effort was started to do RIOS chipset for the unix workstation market ... which came out as rs/6000. then in parallel with the next generation of RIOS chips ... somerset was formed, joint with motorola, apple and others to to power/pc chips (separate from the "power" RIOS chips). misc. past posts mentioning 801, risc, iliad, romp, rios, somerset, power/pc, etc http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 rochester became involved with power/pc effort and something like a decade after as/400 was going to be a 801/risc chip ... it did finally move to 801/risc (power/pc) chip. lots of discussion recently that apple moved off off power/pc to intel because ibm wasn't matching intel in low-power power/pc laptop chips ... (somewhat instead) doing converged power & power/pc ... for higher end "server" market. However, recent article about IBM also having to support the new high-end Intel chips ("IBM goes elephant with Nehalem-EX iron") http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#35 Intel Nehalem-EX Aims for the Mainframe somewhat related posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#4 Handling multicore CPUs; what the competition is thinking http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010g.html#33 SQL Server replacement -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
