But to put it in context, the 24 TOPS that they advertise -- the inference performance of their AI module on their Telum II -- doesn't even match an M4's neural engine (40 TOPS). And of course compared to a dedicated device like an H100 SXM that can hit 4000 TOPS (yes, 166x more). Of course for both the M4 and H100 chip I'm giving quantized numbers, but presumably the Telum II is as it boasts about its quantized support.
Massive caches. Tonnes of memory support. Neat device. A "you won't get fired for leasing this" solution for a few of the Fortune 500.
But you can almost certainly build a magnitudes faster device in just about every dimension using more traditional hardware stacks and for a fraction of the price.
Using the sentence "more traditional hardware stacks" when comparing to mainframes is sorta funny.
It depends. Some years ago, the memory was working at half the bus speed.
MIPS per MIPS, IBM itself offers solutions that have higher processing power than mainframes in their POWER and IBMi series of machines. And you can surely assemble an x86 or ARM monster with a lot of cores, but it won't match the performance of the Z for the workloads it is designed for - on-line transaction processing.
I would not be surprised if a IBM mainframe costs 10x of what a x86 or ARM server of equal performance does.
I wasn’t even aware you could tell the kernel not to schedule on some cores.
Yet, its as easy as:
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu{num}/onlineSome customer may change it even every 3-5 years, but most i saw were between 5 and 7.
Energy and data centre floor space are not a real thing here, the mainframe usage of physical resource is nothing compared to other systems.
It was a crazy business. You’d buy services and other crap in your mainframe deal, but the consultants are really sales guys who have their nose in your tent. Fully captured businesses in insurance and government especially would even use IBMs brand alignment for computers.
I had to close out a deal with them at a past employer when my peer had a medical emergency. It was a very eye opening experience.
For those of us not in that world, could you explain what that means?
And, could you give some details on your last paragraph?
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-2024-main...
I was kind of fascinated with the original Telum CPUs because of this feature. Do we know if other CPU designers are planning a similar virtual cache feature? Or is this feature implemented as a workaround due to some other deficiency that others don't have?
I'm surprised they didn't use HBM3 for CPU cache.
I would have assumed that someone would have started a cloud provider with Linux VMs running on mainframes instead of racks of pizza boxes. What was missing - are the economics of mainframes really that bad?
Also, mainframes/midranges are all about stability, security, and robustness, not performance. For example, IBM i (the OS, not the machine) has a hardware dependent layer, and a hardware-independent one. This allows for drastic hardware changes without affecting the high-level applications. A monolith would be arguably more efficient, but it matters more that the hardware-independent layer stays rock-solid.
https://developer.ibm.com/articles/get-started-with-ibm-linu... https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Wanted#Other
Edit: its "Samsung’s leading edge 5 nm process node" according to the Telum II article linked from one of the other comments here.
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/telum-ii-at-hot-chips-2024-main...
Surprising they aren't using TSMC like pretty much everyone else does.
"[T]he IBM Telum II processors are eight cores running at 5.5GHz and with a 360MB virtual L3 cache and 2.88GB virtual L4 cache. Telum II brings a new data processing unit, I/O advancements, and other features to help accelerate AI workloads."
But if you do, if you actually have such massive data streams and low tolerance for latencies that sharding them over many machines costs a lot in overhead and throughput slows down intolerably at load peaks, then these machines are most likely a bargain. They allow you to do things very few other can do, resulting in a moat around your business and locks you in with IBM.
Or you've been around since the seventies and your software largely consists of COBOL, Fortran and assembly for this line of architectures, and it would cost you two decades of the great rewrite while all your developers do very little else, then it's also a bargain to be able to stay in business.
I recently had to wait two quarters to launch a product because the only person who knew what some cobol accounting program did was out on leave.
This is one of the many reasons many big corporations fail to innovate. It is very hard (near impossible) to implement new systems in an environment dominated by old ones (not talking only about software and hardware here, also organizational dynamics).
Many mangers in large companies, derive their status and power from a knowledge of existing business processes and procedures. Any substantive changes to those procedures obviously represent an existential threat to that position and they generally resist it, often very vigorously.
That being said, the problem isn't so much the COBOL language itself but rather that all the software written in it is connected to all kinds of database system, messaging systems(?) and whatnot, making it very hard to move to some non-mainframe platform even if a customer so chooses. Or to put it another way, it's cheaper to pay even the very high prices to IBM to keep on the mainframe track rather than to migrate.
How many times companies was forced to pay for MS Windows, OEM or not ?
That COBOL apps and os'es used there are all already payd production quality software from XX dot 50's and all that is needed, sometimes, is to put in new piece of hardware. That is totally other civilisation.
Ok, I may be colorizing but this is a general concept.
Don't mention 100 years of "software modifications" because windows ecosystem can't win that contest anyway.