IBM Archive

"IBM and Sun Microsystems did indeed announce an agreement for deploying the Solaris operating system on IBM servers, but it wasn't the system we guessed: IBM will deploy Solaris for its Intel x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers. It's a significant move, as it validates the presence of Sun's operating system among a broad customer base that few can mistake as a "niche." As Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told reporters today, IBM becomes the first Tier 1 reseller of Solaris products and services for x86 platforms." His blog is here.

IBM has announced a version of its System i business server range that uses the company's Power6 processor, which the tech giant claims is the fastest chip it has ever built. The System i 570 uses the 4.7GHz Power6, launched in May, with up to 16 cores, a processor that has come top in many industry benchmarks.

IBM has opened the AIX 6 beta program. "AIX 6 Open Beta participants will be able to download the AIX 6 beta code, Mozilla Firefox, and updates to enable previously purchased IBM compilers to run on AIX 6."

A team comprised of members from Bell-Labs, IBM Research, Sandia National Labs, and Vita Nuova has completed a port of Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputer. Plan 9 kernels are running on both the compute nodes and the I/O nodes and the Ethernet, Torus, Collective Network, Barrier Network, and Management network are all supported. Screenshots are available on the development blog, and a live-demo will be attempted during the USENIX poster session.

IBM finally took the wraps off its much anticipated Power6 microprocessor, which company executives said will double the clock speed of its current Power5 chip, without stretching the power envelope. The Power6 processor, unveiled at an event on May 21 in London, is a dual-core chip with a top clock speed of 4.7GHz, double the 2.3GHz of the Power5+ processors. The new chip also includes 8MB of L2 cache - four times as large as the current Power5 offering - and an internal bandwidth of 300GB per second. Ars' John 'Hannibal' Stokes obviously also has his say.

IBM's Power6 push began this week with a tweak to AIX support. In a letter to customers, IBM vowed to support future updates to AIX 5.3 for an additional two years. This appears to be IBM's Power6 concession, since the vendor, according to our sources, will announce Power6 systems this month and ship them in the middle of the year but won't have AIX 5.4 available for months. Normally, IBM would like to have a new major release of AIX ready for its new processors and have customers upgrade accordingly. No such luck.

IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle's recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said on Friday. This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle - and not IBM - to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.

IBM has announced an open-source desktop, running Lotus apps and Firefox on top of Red Hat or SUSE Linux. It's based on an internal project which has deployed Linux desktops to several thousand IBM staff, in what IBM said was one of the largest corporate Linux roll-outs to date. It added that its Open Client Solution can also take in Windows and Mac users, as there's Lotus software for those as well - although it admits that the Mac version of Notes 8 isn't due until later this year.

"When open-source developers and IBM took gambles on each other, free software showed it can flourish in the heartland of corporate computing." This is chapter 7 (free sample, so to speak) of a book on Linux and free software's rise to fame and use in the corporate world.

Judging by details revealed in a chip conference agenda, the clock frequency race isn't over yet. IBM's Power6 processor will be able to exceed 5 gigahertz in a high-performance mode, and the second-generation Cell Broadband Engine processor from IBM, Sony and Toshiba will run at 6GHz, according to the program for the International Solid State Circuits Conference that begins February 11 in San Francisco.

Today, IBM's blade servers are available with the company's PowerPC 970 processors. But the Power6 will replace those lower-end sibling in blade servers, Tim Doughtery, IBM's BladeCenter strategist, said in an interview Wednesday. The first Power6 servers are slated for delivery mid-2007, and the Power6 blades will arrive 'close to when we bring Power6 to the market', he added.

Just about everyone has expressed an opinion on the Novell/Microsoft patent agreement - except, that is, for the 800-pound gorilla of Linux: IBM. Today, Scott Handy, IBM's VP of Worldwide Linux and Open Source, decided that enough was enough and it was time to state IBM's position. In an interview with Linux-Watch.com, Handy opened by saying that, "IBM has long supported interoperability between Windows and Linux. As supporters of open source and open standards," he continued, "we applaud any effort to bridge this gap."

"Last week at MPF, IBM unveiled some fresh details of its forthcoming POWER6 server microarchitecture. The company has been fairly stingy with POWER6 information, and most of what was released last week involved the system level. Nonetheless, there were a few interesting tidbits for those of us who are into microprocessors."

At the MicroProcessor Forum, Dr. Brad McCredie of IBM continued to tease out particulars regarding the POWER6. The presentation discussed a lot of general microarchitecture features, but did not reveal many specific details; a full revelation of the microarchitecture will likely have to wait till ISSCC, next February. However, from the details that were revealed, it is clear that the POWER6 inherited many characteristics from its predecessors, yet made substantial improvements in others.