[Info-vax] OT: news from the trenches (re: Solaris)

[lists at openmailbox.org]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 15:43:43 -0400
Stephen Hoffman via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> On 2015-03-11 17:54:47 +0000, <lists at openmailbox.org> said:
> 
> > On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 13:38:01 -0400
> > David Froble via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> What other options are there?  VMS cannot support it's own custom CPUs.
> >> Remember Alpha?  So, what's left?
> > 
> > POWER,
> 
> IBM is selling off their fabs, and setting up a POWER processor roadmap 
> with GlobalFoundries.

Well, I don't know about this deal but they "sold" off their z/Architecture
fab to Global Foundries a while ago, and gave them a couple billion bucks
to take it off their hands. Not sure how the word selling applies here but
that's how they framed it.

> "IBM’s POWER chip manufacturing volume isn’t enough to sustain the 
> business on its own."

I don't know what IBM is doing and I don't believe that statement. It seems
to me some people who really don't understand what IBM has traditionally
been about, or perhaps they understand and don't care, are making some
decisions that are going to come back to haunt them in the not too distant
future. IBM has always been a hardware company at the core. They write some
damn good software and provide services but that's to sell hardware.

It's like they threw out the baby with the bathwater.

> IBM has sold off their x86 business and most recently their x86 server 
> business to Lenovo, and I'd wonder of POWER isn't following — albeit 
> following along the ten-year roadmap that is available.

As you know IBM didn't design x86 and it was never their baby. That they
sold it off makes perfect sense and doesn't tell you anything about their
historical major product lines where they controlled the ecosystem end to
end. That's what IBM does. They have a lot of bits and pieces but they
really shine when it comes to designing hardware and peripherals and an OS
to run specifically on those architectures. Selling off z/Arch and POWER
fab is a major directional change and based on that I would bet money one of
two things is going to happen. Either the leadership is going to realize
what they've done and bring back the fab to corp. or IBM will be a much
different, smaller, and less profitable company then we have known.

POWER is open so as long as somebody is fabbing it anybody can make a
server. If they quit making it then yes, there would be a problem. Could
that happen? Certainly.

> Put another way, if I was to be beholden to any particular vendor(s) 
> for my platform hardware beyond the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise folks 
> after HP splits, right now that's probably going to best be Intel 
> and/or AMD, and the various Windows-box providers, as they have the 
> highest volumes and the lowest prices.   This if I weren't going to be 
> using one of those providers to create a bespoke x86-64 box, maybe with 
> a "DSMOSX-like" feature, specifically for OpenVMS, and that can also 
> run Windows and/or VMware and/or RHEL and/or other x86-64 software.

Yeah but you seem to have suggested there's a question whether VMS can or
should run on cheap hardware given the VMS customer is typically a high end
customer. Wouldn't it make sense for a port to a premium hardware platform,
as long as it was open and still being fabbed, as opposed to a crapware
hardware platform that can run "free software" and Windows? If you think
about it I'm not sure porting VMS to Intel is not going to be suicidal.
After they see they can run on cheaper hardware, isn't cheaper software the
next step? And Linux is free and eventually some pinhead is not going to
approve the budget for that wierd OS nobody ever heard of, since Linux is
free...

> Ask yourself what architecture you'd pick here after Itanium, if you 
> were spending, say, ten million dollars of your own money, and wanted 
> to maximize your chances of success when you were launching an 
> operating system business.  Sure, if you had infinite money and/or 
> infinite staff, x86-64 and POWER and MIPS and ARM and SPARC and 
> Ooooh-Shiny and whatever else can pass the Turing test...  But if you 
> had to pick just one, and bet on it?

I would say POWER but it remains to be seen what the future holds in terms
of chip availability and development etc.

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