Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
In 12eafe94-906a-4d41-99a7-574060371...@austin.utexas.edu, on 08/07/2013 at 09:22 PM, Pew, Curtis G curtis@austin.utexas.edu said: I don't have strong feelings about any particular architecture, but I do think we all have a compelling interest that the number of common, commercially available hardware architectures be greater than one. Agreed, and we'd also be better off if the competing architectures, whether CISC or RISC had reasonably regular instruction sets. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT Atid/2http://patriot.net/~shmuel We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
In 4781768291563977.wa.paulgboulderaim@listserv.ua.edu, on 08/07/2013 at 04:39 PM, Paul Gilmartin paulgboul...@aim.com said: And I had been misled by chatter I had heard, possibly about the ECLipz endeavor, the rebuttal of which I failed to notice, to misbelieve the z has Power at its heart. For several generations IBM has used the same technology in Power and z processor chips. The chips, however, are substantially different. I believe that IBM published some articles on older generations, describing what was shared and what was unique. Perhaps I'm better now that I looked deeper in Wikipedia. The wiki chip articles since at least Z196 have been about the entire processor complex rather than about the chips themselves. I wish that some of the IBM chip designers would be willing to take on the task of editing those articles. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT Atid/2http://patriot.net/~shmuel We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress. (S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003) -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
shmuel+...@patriot.net (Shmuel Metz , Seymour J.) writes: The wiki chip articles since at least Z196 have been about the entire processor complex rather than about the chips themselves. I wish that some of the IBM chip designers would be willing to take on the task of editing those articles. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013k.html#6 IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors. however, claim is that at least half of the z196 per processor improvment over z10 was introduction of out-of-order execution, branch prediction, speculative executive ... features which have been part of RISC chips for decades. further use of out-of-order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution were used for z12 increase in per processor improvement over z196. issue is legacy implementation cache miss stalls the execution units and current cache miss memory access latency ... measured in number of processor cycles ... is on the order of 360 disk i/o (i.e. disk i/o latency measured in number of 360 processor cycles). out-of-order execution allows hardware analogy of multi-tasking / multi-threading/programming ... allowing to switch to some other work while current instruction is stalled waiting for memory access on cache miss. the other feature allowing hardware analogy of multi-tasking / muti-threading/programming is hyper-threading. I had gotten sucked into being asked to help when it was worked on for 370/195 (which never shipped). The issue for 370/195 was that pipeline peak throughput was 10mips ... but 370/195 didn't have branch prediction or speculative executive ... as a result conditional branches would stall the pipeline ... and most codes only achieved 5mips throughput. hyperthreading would provide emulated multiprocessing with two instruction streams ... which had a better chance of keeping the execution units operating at peak throughput. note that risc implementations have had throughput advantage of x86 for decades ... however the past several generations of x86 have actually gone to RISC cores with hardware layer that translates x86 instructions into risc micro-ops ... that largely mitigates the throughput differences between risc implementations and x86 implementations. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
however, claim is that at least half of the z196 per processor improvement over z10 was introduction of out-of-order execution, branch prediction, speculative executive Those features are important to systems performance, but I submit that most of the improvement was probably due to the increased clock speed (5.2 GHz vs 4.4) and the changes in cache structure (4 levels vs 3 levels). Bob Shannon Rocket Software -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=MTQzMDM Kind of interesting. Hope people don't mind the fact that it is not about the z. -- As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. Maranatha! John McKown -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 11:55:07 -0500, John McKown wrote: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=MTQzMDM Kind of interesting. Hope people don't mind the fact that it is not about the z. Hmmm. Vaguely reminiscent of Amdahl, Fujitsu, Power Computing, and DayStar. But they probably won't license z/OS for them. -- gil -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
Especially z/OS won't run on POWER. AIX, Linux, and i/OS (the IBM version, not Apple's!) are a possibility. But I doubt that IBM will license the i/OS system either. On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Paul Gilmartin paulgboul...@aim.com wrote: On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 11:55:07 -0500, John McKown wrote: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=MTQzMDM Kind of interesting. Hope people don't mind the fact that it is not about the z. Hmmm. Vaguely reminiscent of Amdahl, Fujitsu, Power Computing, and DayStar. But they probably won't license z/OS for them. -- gil -- As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. Maranatha! John McKown -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
Especially z/OS won't run on POWER It won't run natively but could certainly run under an emulator. Bob Shannon Rocket Software -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
OK. Legally licensed? I know of only two emulators for z/Architecture. One is Hercules/390. The other is IBM's which is used on the zPDT machine (this is a guess on my part). I guess that IBM could license the zPDT, ported to POWER (AIX or Linux?). But I really doubt that they will. Futher discussion will likely devolve to previous observations about IBM's attitude about z/OS (also z/VM, z/VSE, z/TPF) running on non-z hardware. On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 3:14 PM, Bob Shannon bshan...@rocketsoftware.comwrote: Especially z/OS won't run on POWER It won't run natively but could certainly run under an emulator. Bob Shannon Rocket Software -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN -- As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. Maranatha! John McKown -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
john.archie.mck...@gmail.com (John McKown) writes: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_itempx=MTQzMDM Kind of interesting. Hope people don't mind the fact that it is not about the z. Folklore is that Apple moved to Intel because IBM decided to focus on servers and weren't keeping up with low-power chips for laptops and tablets. There was Somerset AIM (apple, ibm, motorola) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC from above: However, toward the close of the decade, manufacturing issues began plaguing the AIM alliance in much the same way they did Motorola, which consistently pushed back deployments of new processors for Apple and other vendors: first from Motorola in the 1990s with the G3 and G4 processors, and IBM with the 64-bit G5 processor in 2003. In 2004, Motorola exited the chip manufacturing business by spinning off its semiconductor business as an independent company called Freescale Semiconductor. Around the same time, IBM exited the 32-bit embedded processor market by selling its line of PowerPC products to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) and focusing on 64-bit chip designs ... and ... The IBM-Freescale alliance was replaced by an open standards body called Power.org. Power.org operates under the governance of the IEEE with IBM continuing to use and evolve the PowerPC processor on game consoles and Freescale Semiconductor focusing solely on embedded devices. ... snip ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power.org trivia, the executive we reported to when we were doing IBM's HA/CMP ... went over to head up the Somerset (Apple, IBM, and Motorola designing power/pc chips) ... he had previously come from Motorola Note that Google, part of OpenPOWER, now owns Motorola. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
OK. Legally licensed? Processor speed increases have slowed and emphasis is being placed on more concurrent processes. This raises the possibility of emulating zArchitecture on Power and eliminating z-specific hardware, something that's been speculated about for years. With the hardware furloughs this week, who knows what's going to happen with IBM hardware. Bob Shannon Rocket Software -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
Too true. Looks more like an Intel vs. ARM future. I'm not enough of a computer scientist to know which is better. I stopped learning the Intel architecture in the i568 time frame. I did _not_ like it. I have looked a bit at ARM and I would likely have been a RISC bigot back in the day. On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Bob Shannon bshan...@rocketsoftware.comwrote: OK. Legally licensed? Processor speed increases have slowed and emphasis is being placed on more concurrent processes. This raises the possibility of emulating zArchitecture on Power and eliminating z-specific hardware, something that's been speculated about for years. With the hardware furloughs this week, who knows what's going to happen with IBM hardware. Bob Shannon Rocket Software -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN -- As of next week, passwords will be entered in Morse code. Maranatha! John McKown -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
On Aug 7, 2013, at 4:08 PM, John McKown john.archie.mck...@gmail.com wrote: Too true. Looks more like an Intel vs. ARM future. I'm not enough of a computer scientist to know which is better. I stopped learning the Intel architecture in the i568 time frame. I did _not_ like it. I have looked a bit at ARM and I would likely have been a RISC bigot back in the day. I don't have strong feelings about any particular architecture, but I do think we all have a compelling interest that the number of common, commercially available hardware architectures be greater than one. In fact, I think three would be better than two, so if IBM can reignite interest in the Power architecture, then good. -- Curtis Pew (c@its.utexas.edu) ITS Systems Core The University of Texas at Austin -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
Re: OT? IBM licenses POWER architecture to other vendors.
On Wed, 7 Aug 2013 20:14:06 +, Bob Shannon wrote: Especially z/OS won't run on POWER It won't run natively but could certainly run under an emulator. OK. And I had been misled by chatter I had heard, possibly about the ECLipz endeavor, the rebuttal of which I failed to notice, to misbelieve the z has Power at its heart. Perhaps I'm better now that I looked deeper in Wikipedia. -- gil -- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
