RE: IBM ready to unleash Austin-based Power chip -- MIDRANGE-L

Nice catch Steve and interesting article !

And "... IBM's venerable midrange product line, formally known as the
AS/400." to boot :-)

Chuck

 
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Landess
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 5:11 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: IBM ready to unleash Austin-based Power chip

IBM ready to unleash Austin-based Power chip

After four years of development, Big Blue thinks server driver is ready

By Kirk Ladendorf
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, May 3, 2004

Building No. 45 on IBM Corp.'s North Austin campus is a squat, unlovely
edifice that only an engineer could love.
But inside, dozens of workers labor in something that engineers really do
love -- a new 52,000-square-foot laboratory complex equipped to evaluate the
smallest chip or the most complex 64-way server.

For nearly a year, the lab has been a torture chamber for Power5, the latest
of the flagship processors designed by the computer maker to become the
heart and brains of its most muscular computers. The chip has been under
development in Austin for the past four years by several hundred engineers.

The chip and the first computer designed around it, code-named Squadron,
passed those tests. Today they become IBM's latest computer system, a
powerful midrange server with both next-generation performance and extreme
flexibility. More than 1,000 IBM workers in Austin worked on either the new
processor or the new computer. Engineers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and
Rochester, Minn., also were involved in the project.

In fact, each processor in the Squadron computer can be split into 10
separate "virtual" machines, each handling different tasks with different
software. The idea is to create extremely flexible machines that work with
the efficiency and flexibility usually associated with big and expensive
mainframe computers.

Those features, analysts say, give IBM a technical lead over its rivals.

"They have products in the Power line that nobody else matches," says
analyst Charles King with the Sageza Group in Union City, Calif.
The influence of Power is spreading across IBM's product lines. The chip
architecture was created for IBM's Austin-based Unix computing effort.

But Power also has found itself in enormous scientific supercomputers and
now in IBM's venerable midrange product line, formally known as the AS/400.

IBM also has said it is willing to license its chip designs to other
companies that want to use them for their own products. Derivations of the
Power4 are used by Apple Computer Inc., and other Power-related chips are
used in devices as varied as video game consoles and communications gear.

The challenge remains for IBM to keep turning engineering prowess into
revenue.

Big Blue has risen from a distant third in the Unix computing market to
first overall in the fourth quarter of 2003, with a 32.9 percent revenue
share, according to the IDC market research firm. IBM also ranked first in
total server revenue with $14.4 billion in 2003, for a 31.6 percent share,
compared with second-place Hewlett-Packard Co., which had $12.5 billion in
revenue for a 27.3 percent share. Sun Microsystems Inc. ranked third with
$5.4 billion in revenue, while Round Rock's Dell Inc. was fourth at $4.2
billion.

Tony Befi, IBM's senior executive in Austin, says the diversity of technical
talent here helps systems engineers and chip designers to expand their
horizons and create innovations that are meaningful to customers.

"We get to leverage the collective IQ of all the technical disciplines
here," he said. "We are going someplace where our competitors will try hard
to follow."

kladendorf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx