anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on August 10, 2014 9:03 pm wrote:
> Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 10, 2014 2:21 pm wrote:
> > Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 10, 2014 2:21 am wrote:
> > > Now you are out of your depth. Even dead Itanium is going to last for at least 5-6
> > > years. Such live bodies as SPARC and esp. Power will be around for much longer.
> >
> > Zombies do not count, Freescale is still selling Motorola 68000 chips for Gods sake.
> > IBM still sells a 64bit upgrade to the ancient 360 mainframe, which has pretty good performance.
> >
> > The IBM POWER division is losing billions, it has to expand into/create the high end ARM server
> > market or get shut down.
>
> What's the reasoning for this crazy idea?
>
> How would the POWER business model, that you say is unsustainable, become
> sustainable if it was switched to a new, unproven, and incompatible ISA?
>
> At this point, if IBM is to persist with custom high end server CPU
> design, they seem far better in continuing with the OpenPower push.

The ARM bandwagon is sucking all the oxygen from OpenPower, everyone is converting designs to ARM.
IBM pushes Linux on Power hard: "Supported on every Power Systems server we make, Linux on Power Systems is the only infrastructure that offers both scale- out and scale -up choices that align to your needs. Optimize your workloads for emerging business challenges with industry standard Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux distributions."

But you have to recompile to move apps to POWER. Being ARM like everyone else soon will be removes that huge roadblock to sales and use.

I agree that it sounds like a crazy idea for IBM to get into the ARM business, it is much more likely the division will get shut down, spun off, downsized to irrelevance, etc.

The networking companies are building high power 4 and 6 wide ARM designs, these will make it into Servers/PCs/laptops/networking/etc. Programmers need high end equipment and cost is no object, witness all those Mac Pros being sold to make iOS games/software.

There is going to be a huge vacuum of need at the high end for ARM CPU's, the only company that could fill that vacuum is IBM. Otherwise we wait to 2016 for AMD ARM chips. IBM can make a better high end CPU than AMD and people will buy the CPU's.

I admit it is a crazy stretch of an idea. But if you remove the need for a recompile people will pay $10,000 for the sort of CPU's IBM makes.