IBM goes gunning for Intel with Nvidia GPU-charged Power8 servers Now that it's officially out of the x86 server biz, IBM is hitting the gas on its Power processor strategy with new Power8-based iron that incorporates GPU acceleration tech from Nvidia for the first time. The IBM Power S824L is both the first Power server to include Nvidia Tesla GPUs and the first product to be born out of …
The irony that over 30 years ago, Intel and Microsoft were completely beholden to IBM, and Big Blue could have bought both companies with a few million from the piggy bank.
And almost ever since, IBM has pursued all these wild strategies (OS/2, Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony, Power PC, etc etc etc) to try to steal business back from them.
I was referring to the failed marketing head-to-head attempts with various products. There was nothing technically wrong with Power PC, OS/2, or even some of the Lotus lines of products for that matter. But the fact is, IBM kept getting into weird marketing competitions with their former partners, failing miserably each time from a total market share perspective.
"OS/2 was a partnership with MS, MS got NT out of the deal."
That's not exactly correct - NT was a separate parallel development by Microsoft led by Dave Cutler - who was a key VMS developer. Hence for instance why the NT security ACL and audit models and modular hybrid kernel are very advanced in nature versus other non mainframe OSs at the time. Microsoft did take some limited technology from OS/2 into NT - but they didn't 'get NT' from IBM.
I almost got my ass kicked by a guy at Oktoberfest this weekend for playing that exact same type of word game.
Microsoft's NT was both of these things. It wasn't that MS turned OS/2 into NT, it was that IBM believed that NT was supposed to be the next generation of OS/2 until such time as MS said "we don't need to sell this to IBM". This is almost proved by the fact that early versions of NT actually shipped with an OS/2 subsystem and if I recall correctly, HPFS support. At that time, OS/2's desktop manager (can't remember the nifty name power something I think) was almost exactly the same between OS/2 1.2 and Windows 3. This is why it was so easy to port code.
IBM got really burned on that deal because as you mentioned, the VMS style kernel was substantially better than the half baked solution from IBM in OS/2 v2. The bad part for MS was that it took 12 years before x86 could handle such advanced technology gracefully. Now, I have a Arduino style board from Intel which is running the NT kernel... supported... by Microsoft. Who'd have ever imagined I'd be running Windows NT to change the color of an LED inside a cat toy?
Any chance there are linpack numbers for the power8 + GPU?
I am assuming it is more tightly coupled than x86+PCIe, which would make this interesting.
But at 37K for 3GHz 24 -core (192G), I would expect some mention of the GPU grunt.
Since the latest AMD/Nivida peaks seem in the 1-2TFlop/DP (somewhere like 3-10x for SP), is IBM just selling to those who already have one?
For that amount of $$ it would be nice if was price competitive on HPC loads...and their benchmarks did not include LINPACK....
P.
One of the points was to make it cheaper to get POWER systems actually into your datacentre, especially on a large scale. There is still no announcement about actually getting some lower cost POWER boxes from anyone.
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