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Posted by bonzini 12 hours ago

IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm(newsroom.ibm.com)
243 points | 154 commentspage 2
JSR_FDED 9 hours ago|
IBM is desperate to keep the mainframe relevant. The typical transactional workloads are going to stay on the mainframe, and by bolting on ARM “for AI”they’re giving their customer CIOs a reason to defend their decision to stick with the mainframe.
bonzini 9 hours ago|
This certainly has been in the making for longer than the "everything we do must be for AI" bubble. In fact s390 has its own on-die inference engines and they have access to the same caching mechanisms as the main processor (which are quite insane).
mghackerlady 8 hours ago||
IBM has been on the AI hypetrain since 2018ish iirc
george_belsky 6 hours ago||
Nvidia tried, it’s IBM turn now
christkv 10 hours ago||
Arm co processors for main frames?
rbanffy 10 hours ago||
AIX for ARM? ;-)
mghackerlady 7 hours ago|
Is modern ARM stuff done big-endian? because AIX is exclusively BE iirc
yjftsjthsd-h 6 hours ago|||
That, weirdly, should be fine; ARM is bi-endian in the sense of being perfectly happy to run either way. In fact, the easiest way I know of to test software on a big endian system is to run a perfectly ordinary Raspberry Pi with NetBSD's big endian port for it:)
mghackerlady 5 hours ago||
Yeah, I know ARM is bi-endian (pretty much all non-x86 archs used nowadays are) but the question is if it's actually enough to have a software base for it. NetBSD having an ARM port in BE is great but most arm stuff is done for LE systems since MacOS, and NT, and most Linux stuff is LE. This isn't that much of a problem in the free software world because we like to test things on obscure architectures but for the kind of proprietary stuff that you'd want to run on arm might have problems (assuming it wasn't ported AIX already)
rbanffy 7 hours ago|||
I never said it'd be an easy port, although there was an x86 (and s/390) port back when time itself was new.

edit: s/390 is big endian.

adolph 9 hours ago||
I wonder how this relates to Linaro, a joint venture of ARM, IBM, and others started in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linaro

AndrewB234 2 hours ago||
[dead]
jonkoops 12 hours ago||
TLDR; “fine, we’ll support Arm too because customers want it.”
ghaff 12 hours ago|
Is that such a silly notion?
jonkoops 8 hours ago||
No, but it is a lot of corporate speak for such a simple announcement.
shevy-java 10 hours ago||
Is that good or bad?

My gut feeling says to lean more on the bad side. I am very skeptic when corporations announce "this is for the win". Then I slowly walk over to the Google Graveyard and nod my head wisely in sadness ... https://killedbygoogle.com/

EdoardoIaga 7 hours ago||
great
panick21_ 9 hours ago|
IBM and 'track record of innovation' ... is a bit of an understatement.
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