System z mainframes and larger models of System i and System p already
share almost all of their technology ... a shared memory architecture
that allows more than one processor to share main storage, the internal
high-speed bus and interconnect hardware, power supplies, DASD, etc. --
this has been going on for several years now. Put a large System z next
to a large System i or System p, and it is hard to tell them apart,
externally.
Some things were added to Power6 that seemed to suggest that the
mainframe could use POWER processors as their "engine" in the future. See:
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/decifaq3.html
Just this week, IBM announced the new z10, featuring the new z6
processor chip, which is very similar to the Power6, created with the
same "chip fab" technology, but using a different ISA (instruction set
architecture) namely, that of the mainframe z/Architecture. See:
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/IBM-*z6*-mainframe-microprocessor-Webb.pdf
and
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/
See here for a whole bunch of related links:
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/#implement
So it seems to be slowly coming to pass that the System i, System p and
System z will continue to share more and more of the technology. Only
the actual processor and ISA remains different. Whether that will change
in the future remains to be seen.
Operating systems continue to differentiate these platforms. On System
z, you can run z/OS, z/VSE or z/VM, and Linux. On System i, you can run
i5/OS, AIX and Linux. On System p, you can run AIX, i5/OS and Linux.
The future should be "very interesting."
> Trevor Perry wrote:
Frank Soltis has been mentioning that with minor changes, the z chips can
run inside the Power servers. He suggests that the Power server as we know
it could easily run AIX, i5/OS and zOS in the future. From what I know, this
is not a stated direction of IBM, but one that the industry thinks may
happen.
On 2/29/08 12:13 PM, "Elvis Budimlic" <ebudimlic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
...(snip)...
Any truth to that?
Elvis
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