Power11: Zero Planned Downtime Made Easy
Power11 has finally been launched, and what we’re seeing is an evolution, not a revolution, in silicon. It’s a very similar chip to Power10, but an updated 7nm process and all-new packaging technology means we’ll get more threads (up to 240 per socket from 192), higher clock speeds, and higher memory bandwidth (P10 peaked at […]
No, LLMs Don’t Think Like Humans
When ChatGPT first hit the scene, I knew enough about neural networks to have a good guess at what it would fail at. I found I could quickly expose its inability to reason by feeding it abstract pattern sequences or simple math problems. Essentially, it would do poorly at any question where you can’t easily […]
Cloud or On-Premise? Try both!
It wasn’t that long ago that industry analysts were predicting the death of the on-premise server and the migration of virtually all enterprise computing to “the cloud.” Somewhat famously, Gartner Analyst Dave Cappuccio predicted in 2019 that by 2025, 80% of all businesses will have shut down their data centers and moved everything to “the […]
How PowerAXON Enables AI
I’ve been kind of a techie all my life. I taught myself how to program in QBASIC on a 286 when I was just a kid, and was writing custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to run games in MS-DOS before I could shave. And like most people into computers, I cared about pretty much one […]
Rocky Linux On IBM Power Really Rocks
Anyone who’s had to deal with an unfamiliar operating system knows that you can have the fastest platform in the world, but if the operating system isn’t there for you, it might as well be a million-dollar conversation piece. IBM had a long history of in-house operating systems. Old timers might remember CP/M, and in […]
Spyre-accelerated Power11: The Coolest AI Platform of 2025
Next year, IBM is launching Power11. As a CPU, Power11 is an improvement over Power10. IBM has already announced 20% more cores, and faster clock speeds. However, remember that Power is a system, not just a chip. A brand-new feature coming to this system in 2025 is the Spyre accelerator. IBM’s engineers took a long, […]
Accelerating HPC on Power with Job Concurrency
Trucks are a big part of getting work done in the modern world. It’s safe to say that without trucks, our world would look radically different. One truck you see around Texas a lot is the 3/4-ton “dually” pickup, usual. It’s a big truck and hauls a lot of stuff. But for serious hauling? Nothing […]
Understanding SMT-8 Technology
The term “multithreading” gets thrown around a lot, and it can refer to a number of different technologies. It’s often not entirely clear what those technologies are, sometimes even to software developers. We’re going to talk about hardware multithreading, which is completely different from software multithreading. So let’s clarify the difference: Hardware multithreading is when […]