And they got the highest performance 14nm FinFET process on the market for P9 and z14 while clearing the way to compete against fabless AMD and ARM vendors with P10. If anything, intel looks stupid here after falling behind in fab tech and causing immense turmoil for their external fab customers.
A trivial review of IBM's systems revenue versus the datacenter breakout of any other CPU maker earnings reports will net you: yes, it is indeed quite successful.
No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up. IBM juices the data center systems metrics with their cross-selling strategy. You need to look at the deals, they give away stuff like storage or even software.
IBM was brilliant in how it rolled up the mainframe/old school Unix/AS400 business on the hardware side. But that playbook was based on big traditional companies and leveraging the base and relationships... there’s a reason that AIX essentially is the last proprietary Unix. But every EA renewal cycle Microsoft is shipping some Azure, some department is buying a SaaS platform, old school IT directors are retiring, etc. It’s a slowly dying business and has been for a long time.
Intel has its own problems, but they are a different category of problem. Even then, we have multiple suppliers, and Intels struggles ultimately help the x64 platform.
> No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up.
Performance and price never had a linear relationship. Past a certain point each "unit" of performance costs substantially more than the previous. Think 80-20 rule.
This is true, but with modern applications, it tends to be more economical to scale out vs up.
If you're running a big implementation of software that scales up or has licensing rules that make scale-out expensive (ie. Oracle), Power is a no-brainer. Problem is that generally speaking, the industry had gone a different path.
As always this is a "right tool for the job" discussion. There's no silver bullet. But the fact that price rises faster than performance the closer you are to peak performance doesn't say anything about the value of the product. The problem is usually when you can no longer scale out. You'll see the same with storage, GPU, RAM, etc.
Because Power is on such a slow (and getting slower) cycle, it seems like the best case for Power10 is for it to be ahead of Epyc for one year then be behind for 4-5 years. And the worst case is that Power10 will already be behind Epyc when it is released.
Revenue is a different story that doesn't necessarily reflect technical merit.
It's nice that, with the ISA being open, now IBM won't need to compete with commodity chip maker pressures and niche providers can make directly compatible chips on a regular schedule which suits their niches best.
As for the number of cores, memory bandwidth needs to keep those cores fed and now we're just seeing real memory bandwidth improvements - the number of cores and threads is expected to increase commensurately with that in the next revisions of the micro-architecture.
Shipping excellent, up to date, and competitive processors is more than just releasing a moderately tweaked, more tightly binned SKU every 6 months.
Neither AMD nor Intel shine though, if they were the target of the comparison. For the past 5+ years Intel more or less released slightly tweaked versions of the same CPUs and all those tiny bumps were just wiped out anyway so we can basically just count on marginal power improvements. And up until Zen in 2017 AMD had practically been a no-show for 6 years.
A trivial review of IBM's systems revenue versus the datacenter breakout of any other CPU maker earnings reports will net you: yes, it is indeed quite successful.