IBM Drops The "Silliness" - POWERXX Is Indeed POWER10 With Updated Open-Source Patches

[fuzz]

Super old joke. If IBM invented sushi they would've called it "dead fish with cold rice".

That is a better description of it.

[CommunityMember]

Buying RedHat just gave them ....

A long term services income stream. It is always about the money.

[edwaleni]

A long term services income stream. It is always about the money.

Correct. When they went whole hog on Java, and made it x-platform in their world, they made a lot of money converting shops globally.

The only issue now is that most of that excess revenue props up dividends. They have shed so many divisions over the years, their core R&D hasn't been the same.

At least they have System Q now (quantum compute), but I have a feeling that Google and Amazon are going to be right with them on that.

[starshipeleven]

Doubt it. IBM didn’t need To buy RedHat to support S/390 nor POWER. They’ve been doing that first party in house for nearly 20 years. Buying RedHat just gave them first party control over the rest of the support stack in user space.

Also SUSE and Ubuntu support POWER and Z-systems

[squash]

Still hoping IBM finds a way to target more mainstream price points. I'm not using x86 because I want to use x86, but my budget doesn't allow for a Talos workstation. Awesome machines, don't get me wrong, but not even in the ballpark for me.

[jacob]

Yes as a server, but as a desktop it's been lagging, needing a lot of workarounds. Maybe it's improved the past few months, not sure. I was looking into buying a Blackbird board from Raptor last year, but the graphics card issues and lack of software support for basics like a good web browser made me lose interest. If I drop that much money I want a fully functional system, not a tinkering hobby project with hit-or-miss graphics support.

Would you mind developing that a little bit? I'm eyeing a Blackbird or even Talos too, but what you are saying is worrying. What graphic card issues are there? I thought getting an AMD-based graphic card supported by the open source AMDGPU driver, believing (perhaps naively) that it would just work, is it not the case then? And what is the web browser situation - again, I expected that Firefox would work normally (heck, it does even on a Raspberry PI), are there any roadblocks?

[curaga]

amdgpu had some bugs in older kernels, but should fully work on current versions. The browser situation was that everything works but there is no JIT - no playing JS games, and using JS-heavy sites would be slow.

[Dieter]

Will the POWER10 be pin compatable with POWER9 ?