Anders Johansson wrote:
On Sunday 13 November 2005 04:29, Sid Boyce wrote:
If you are AMD, you understand that Intel is likely to unleash some features to render your hardware obsolete in a timeframe that you can't react to speedily enough,
No actually, I don't. You see, the problem is that Intel can't make AMD machines obsolete without at the same time making their own machines obsolete, which the market won't accept. This is why Itanium failed so miserably. Intel is simply locked into its own past.
You are no doubt correct, both IBM and more recently Intel have been shown that they are not masters of the PC architecture. If you are AMD you probably want to cover all bases - Fear is the main driver in this industry and it shows - if Itanium had been successful, the air would be thick with flying pigs, yet some faction within Intel was able to convince senior management it was the only sane business model and the one sure way to smash AMD, likewise AMD needed a credible anti-FUD story to tell.
with the need for redesigning and retooling, so recoding in microcode gives you the ability to swiftly respond. For years that's how we at Amdahl were able to stay with the twists and turns by IBM that were designed to kill us off.
I think that's slightly different, since the mainframe market is far lower volume, IBM is/was in contact with each of their customers (who in many cases didn't buiy, they leased), so their ability to introduce new, incompatible features is/was far higher than Intel's will ever be
Lower numbers, mega bucks, it didn't seem like low volume when growth rates were so high and the amount of work to turn out a new machine was so huge. The major stranglehold IBM had on the industry was ownership of both software and hardware definitions, that's why I was asking our senior management why we weren't fighting to have the FTC authorities order that hardware specs be drawn up by a separate industry body. I obviously got nowhere with that, I'd ask one question and get an answer to one I didn't ask, instead they kept feeding us a line that Solaris and SPARC was going to blow away the mainframe. Once we effectively left the scene, mainframe sales from the one remaining vendor went sky high once more and we could only drool. It'll be interesting to see how the guys at PSI (Platform Solutions Inc.) make an impact this time around, all the mainframe resilience and reliability features in an Itanium based box + Amdahl firmware running z/OS, Linux, Windows, Solaris x86 and I imagine a lot else also.
When IBM started off on that road, we didn't have microcode, so we had to add a FAM (Fast Assist Mode) so that when the new instructions generated an exception, they could be emulated by substituting a series of software instructions - so Microcode and Macrocode appeared in our succeeding products. An ex-colleague remarked last week how amazing it is that the latest greatest stuff like Xen has been standard on mainframes (Amdahl MDF followed by IBM LPAR's) for decades. Eventually IBM got us, not by technology, but by nearly going under themselves.
mainframes created almost all technology we see today. I have said many times that the past 30 or so years in computer development could have been skipped by giving the 3270 3D accelerated graphics
SGI and Sun stepped into that slot admirably, and Apple, so the mainframe makers didn't see the need for or care about graphics. If you wanted something standard, 3270 was it and if you had higher demands, a Sun workstation with X3270 Windows did the lot. Now you see lots of NT/W2K have replaced the Sun kit, perhaps the IBM HMC based on Linux may drive a change to Linux. Speaking to the smart ex-colleagues, they have moved some and are moving all the diagnostic tools over to Linux, these guys always saw great merits in Linux, but the majority of the average support techs and some managers often tried to give me grief for using Linux, so it sure was a smug feeling when they all started having Linux business plans in their presentations. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks