Deep Inside Rochester

Real World Technologies (RWT) has an article on the IBM eCLipz project, "An eCLipz Looms on the Horizon" by David Kanter, which includes more discussion on POWER6.

In addition, the article is discussed here on Ars Technica.

The Kanter article briefly mentions iSeries and oS/400 as they relate to the economics of convergence and economies of scale. The author writes that "most platforms that did survive, such as OpenVMS, now share hardware with UNIX operating systems to better amortize the development costs. IBM took this same approach with the iSeries; OS/400 runs on a basically unmodified pSeries systems based on the POWER5."

I agree with the observation, but as many [AS/400, iSeries, i5] customers know, especially those that read The Four Hundred newsletter, the sharing of microprocessor technology between i and p goes back well before POWER5. In fact, it goes back to the "Apache" processor introduced in 1997. Sharing continued with the Star family of processors from 1998 to 2000 and the POWER4 processor in 2001.

# posted by Bob Donovan @ 6:14 PM