[email protected] (Tony Harminc) writes: > Which is why I've wondered here why IBM doesn't try to find some > market for those chips that's different enough from the traditional > mainframe one that it won't bite into it, but still lets them sell the > chips for at least something. > > Well, maybe they have tried, and maybe there just isn't any such > market, given the characteristics of the chips: ho-hum > price/performance, not massively parallel, but extreme on-chip > reliability. Presumably market segments that need reliability have > already worked around flaky chips by using other (higher layer) > approaches.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014j.html#93 Demonstrating Moore's law by 30yrs ago, hardware reliability got to the point that majority of service outages were no longer hardware and shifting to human mistake and environemtal (power, storms, flooding, fires, etc) ... as a result next incremental improvement service availability required geographic replication. once you have geographic replication for high service availability ... then the replicated systems would also mask any incidental hardware failure. in the late 80s and early 90s we did ibm's ha/cmp (high availability) and we demonstrating superior operational characteristics against pure hardware fault tolerant. At the time out marketing, I coin'ed the terms "disaster survivability" and "geographic survivabilty" Anyway, as a result I got asked to write a section for the ibm corporate continuous strategy document ... but then it got pulled when both rochester (as/400) and pok (mainframe) complained they couldn't meet the objectives. Then the cluster scaleup part of ha/cmp was transferred, we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four processors, and announced as ibm supercomputer for technical and scientific *ONLY*. old reference to meeting Ellison's conference room first part of january1992 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/95.html#13 within a month of that meeting it had been announced as ibm supercomputer ... some old email http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa past ha/cmp posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp past continuous availability posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#available Jim Gray was major person at ibm san jose research creating the original relational/sql database. When he left for tandem, he palmed a lot of stuff on me. While at tandem he did a lot of studies&surveys for availability&outages ... and also the prime mover behind TPC benchmarks. http://www.tpc.org/information/who/gray.asp old gray presentation on service outages http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/grayft84.pdf -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
