I recently attended an IBM "Executive Briefing" in Austin, Texas, on IBM's plans for the pSeries hardware. Nowhere did this come up. Just the opposite. The pSeries folks were frankly in admiration of the zSeries processors, and hoped to someday be in the same tier of reliability with it. The way this is being done within IBM is by combining the processor development teams. There are now zSeries folks working on pSeries, etc. They're transferring a lot of the technology built into the zSeries into the Power line, primarily error recovery stuff that is on-chip, but other things as well. (Some of which I'm unsure I can talk about, so I won't.) Their main goal for the near future is to have as much error recovery circuitry on the processor as zSeries does (currently around 40% of the total).
Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: David Boyes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 9:25 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: IBM's Power5+ to hit 3GHz > Power5+, Power6 -> zSeries is what I've been waiting for years. It does make a lot of sense. Assuming multiple cores per chip, then a lot of the issues around the 390 being weak for problems involving computational intensity could just go away. Take a 4 core Power6, dedicate just one of the 4 to floating point, and you've got yourself a fairly serious number cruncher. Stuff 20 of them on a MCM, and we're in spitting range of a gigaflop per module. > One processor family across the board. Way to go, IBM! It'll be even more interesting to see how the I/O system develops. If we start having crossovers between Z and P for that stuff, then this gets even more intelligent. Neat stuff. I just hope it's true. -- db
