Anyone fancy a free performance upgrade? Well if you are running a POWER8 or POWER9 and your firmware is up to date, you may just be able to get a performance increase by changing a single setting in the Hypervisor. This is not an April Fool, it a free 10% performance boost that is free […]
Community Matters
Communities or User Groups are a great source of education as well as networking opportunities with experts and your fellow peers, if you are not part of one you should be, here’s an example why. I attended a User Group meeting organised by i-UG (UK) in February and was treated to some great sessions, one […]
IBM i Dashboard
In all of those cool computer control rooms you see in the movies, there is always some simple screen that the technician looks at when there is a problem. Admittedly this computer techie is not normally the hero of the movie, nor are they usually the most dashing of characters but nevertheless, they have a […]
Say hello to the new POWER9 and go buy a POWER8
IBM has just announced the all new POWER9 based AC922 model and it looks great! I’ll talk about that a little more later but for now just know that it’s faster than ever but these first models are focusing on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and will be running Linux only. We can expect to see the […]
Opinion: Why IBM Power Systems are like Lego
I like Lego. Always have. We had a load of bricks when I was growing up and I built loads of robots, spaceships and other models. Now I have children of my own and I get to build Lego sets with them too. I built the Lego Millennium Falcon with my eldest, which took a […]
Power8 thrashes Xeon in financial workload tests
Power8 processors pack over twice the punch of their x86 counterparts when it comes to running financial applications. Those were the findings presented by IBM to the benchmarking organisation STAC earlier this month. The STAC Summit in London attracted banking tech experts from all over Europe who heard how a Power8-based system set new performance […]
New E850 packs AIX and Linux-only punch
Big Blue has broadened its Power Systems range with the introduction of a new E850 model. But while other recently introduced models like the E880 and E870 can run AIX, IBM i and Linux, the E850 will run AIX and Linux only, causing eyebrows to be raised. The peerless Timothy Prickett Morgan makes some very […]
OpenPower conference bears East Asian fruit
OpenPower Foundation members showed off some potentially game-changing new hardware at their first full conference in San Jose, California, last week. The Open Power consortium was formed by IBM in August, 2013, in an attempt to create a renewed ecosystem around its Power processor technology. From four original partners, the group has grown to 110 […]
Power8 gets more acceleration, new compilers
Altera has unveiled new accelerators for Power chips and Nvidia is to introduce compilers to run x86 Linux apps on the processors more easily. Silicon Valley-based Altera makes field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are used to speed up processing (pictured). It announced support for IBM’s OpenPower Foundation in November, 2013, and is listed as a […]
GlobalFoundries gets $1.5 billion to make Power chips
IBM is to sell its processor manufacturing arm to GlobalFoundries. Big Blue announced today that it will pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take its chip factories in New York and Vermont off its hands. GlobalFoundries will be IBM’s exclusive provider for 22 nanometer, 14nm and 10nm processor chipsets for the next 10 years. Plus GlobalFoundries […]