On 30/10/2018 14:40, Simon Matter wrote:
On 30/10/2018 06:46, Simon Matter wrote:
On 10/29/18 1:55 AM, Simon Matter wrote:
To me it seems like, if they are smart, they will try to push IBM POWER and RedHat Linux together to establish real competition in the hardware market again (and of course don't forget to keep Fedora/CentOS alive)!
Er, RHEL has been running on Power for a very long time. The fastest supercomputer in the world is Power9 + RHEL.
What I meant is that POWER could become a competitor for Intel/AMD based servers. We're now running AMD EPYC servers with 64Cores/128Threads and we didn't find any POWER system which could compete in this area.
As a matter of interest, did you look at IBM's own Power Systems (IBM System i, AS/400, System p, as was)? They promote some of these models as having very powerful processing capabilities but I wonder how they compare in practice with Epyc or Xeon systems.
I always had the impression that those IBM systems were priced in a different range from what we were interested in. And I know that I didn't find any price listed online when looking for POWER servers from IBM last time - and I know what that means :-)
Yup, I thought they'd be eye-wateringly expensive.
Nevertheless, they are just rackmount servers, much like the kinds of x86-64 servers you can buy from Dell, Lenovo, HPE, Tyan, Gigabyte, etc. Better CPUs and buses but otherwise quite similar.
If they came back now with something like their deprecated X86 servers (Netfinity, System x) but on POWER, that could be interesting.
Haven't the IBM x86 servers gone to Lenovo now?
As far as I can see, IBM Power Systems *are* in effect what you are looking for, i.e. a Power-based server to run Linux (or AIX or IBM i if you prefer) -- well, that's how IBM would see it I think. They already support Linux on Power Systems. But I don't think they are going to undercut themselves, sadly.