[Interest] Interest Digest, Vol 79, Issue 21

Roland Hughes roland at logikalsolutions.com
Sat May 5 16:58:45 CEST 2018


On 05/01/2018 06:06 PM, interest-request at qt-project.org wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 May 2018 07:38:52 PDT Roland Hughes wrote:
>> For decades the x86 defined the absolute bottom of the IT universe. When
>> you didn't care about it you put it on x86.
> You do realise that 99% of the Cloud today is x86, right? Of the rest of the
> 1%, I'm going to guess it's 50-50 between ARM and IBM POWER, with only the
> latter usually running in big-endian mode. So right about 99.5% of the cloud
> and Internet datacentres are little-endian.
LOL,

And I still hear Chicago Bears fans singing the "Super Bowl Shuffle," 
but that glory day passed and will never return again.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3178387/servers/microsoft-ports-windows-server-os-to-arm-with-help-from-qualcomm.html

Okay, admittedly, MS had yet another EPIC fail there. ZUNE-3 as it were 
with ZUNE-2 being Windows Mobile and Microsoft Bob is in a distant 
category keeping Microsoft Money company. Both of them are constantly 
bothered by this gnat called Clippy. If those names mean nothing to you, 
consider yourself a child and go look them up. The failure here was pure 
Microsoft, not the Qualcomm side of life and the rest of the industry 
saw that.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/red-hat-bets-data-centers-are-ready-arm-servers

https://www.ubuntu.com/server    Runs on all major architectures – x86, 
x86-64, ARM v7, ARM64, POWER8 and IBM s390x (LinuxONE)


*Ah LinuxONE. Where SuSE and Ubuntu go to run clouds.**A big-endian z-box.*


https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-mainframe-lives-on-in-ibms-linuxone/

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/systems/the-next-phase-of-secured-computing-ibm-cloud-private-on-z/

https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/04/back-future-cloud-wont-replace-mainframe/

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2872096/ibm-s-z13-and-the-case-for-the-mainframe-cloud.html

https://www.wired.com/2015/01/z13-mainframe/

https://www.suse.com/c/mainframe-versus-server-farm-comparison/

http://enterprisesystemsmedia.com/article/mainframes-are-still-at-the-heart-of-the-modern-tech-world#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu%20qspwjefe)&ts=1525461227


Data centers have been moving to ARM (the new absolute bottom) and 
Z-machines for quite some time now. The x86 has both heat and power 
problems which cannot be overcome. Even HP switched to selling ARM based 
servers in 2014.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1800094#.Wu20CtYh2V4

Though IBM has been pushing Power into the low end market and there is a 
legitimate reason for the low end market to consider that path. Once 
your server farm exceeds size X you can transition to a Z-box without a 
lot of pain reducing both power consumption and cooling requirements of 
the data center. With x86 and ARM one is screwed. You have to build a 
different data center connected to a different power grid. There is no 
path up. Well, the x86 based server farms first migrate to ARM, 
drastically reducing power and heat, but, not permanently moving the 
goal post.

Even Google dumped INTEL.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/google-taps-ibm-rackspace-to-dent-intel-s-hold-on-server-chips

Google voice has been ported to a Z-machine. It was squirreled away in 
one of the above links.

Da Bears - day ain't in da Super Bowl.
Da Fridge - don't play football no more.
Da Coach - don't live in da city no more.
Da x86 - just a shadow in Da Datacenter now.

Eventually Bears fans will realize it's not 1986 anymore. Eventually x86 
fans will realize it's not 1999 anymore. Until then we will have these 
discussions.

While all of this is an entertaining conversation, it doesn't change the 
fact that big-endian ___must___ remain the default binary format for the 
class in question. That class was initially created for the sole purpose 
of communicating back to real computers. Your personal view of the chip 
universe (or mine for that matter) does ___NOT___ change the purpose of 
that class. I don't even like IBM! I grew up on DEC hardware with OpenVMS.

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/app_book.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS

It's up or out in the IT world. For decades the x86 defined the absolute 
bottom of the IT industry. It grew consuming its betters which refused 
to move up. Remember Wang? The mini-computer giant whose market segment 
was collaborative word processing. During the late 1980s the PC got 
WordPerfect and people lived without real-time collaboration. Wang went 
bye-bye. What's the biggest selling point for word processing today? 
Real-time collaboration. The need didn't go away, just the willingness 
to pay for it.

Singer used to make computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singer_System_10

Then along came DEC with the PDP 11 and RSTS/E with VT52 terminals, 
quickly followed by real VT-100 terminals, not the absolutely worthless 
"vt-100" emulators in the Linux world, but actual VT-100 terminals which 
worked with both RSTS/E and VMS. The software things in the Linux world 
instantly get someone designated as a "maintainer" who disables roughly 
half of the keyboard/emulator functionality because it conflicts with VIM.

At any rate, the ERP package (Perspective 500, 800, etc.) I worked on 
came from a Singer BASIC package. That's how I know that Singer, famous 
for sewing machines, also used to make business computers.

I'm old, so I could go on about the various niches midrange and 
mainframe computers had and why they failed. Hell, DEC was the first and 
only midrange which could talk with every computer back in the day. They 
spent a lot of time and money designing DECnet, making it secure and 
reliable. It wasn't free though. Eventually customers decided they would 
just use this new fangled TCP/IP stuff on a near "free" OS allowing 
hackers from around the world to steal customer data, identities, 
engineering specs, whatever they wanted, because it was cheaper than 
paying for something. (After Facebook, that pendulum is going to swing 
the other direction for a while though.)

The x86 is sitting ___EXACTLY___ where Wang was.

The bottom end can do waaaay more for a fraction of the 
cost/electricity/heat. The x86 can't even dream about chasing the 
transactional I/O throughput of a Z-box, in large part, because that 
requires building an entire machine, not just a chip. Lots of the market 
has moved to tablets which are already ARM. Corporate desktops are 
moving (have moved) to notebooks/laptops, many of which are now using ARM.

It's odd. OpenVMS found its way into most IBM owned data centers because 
engineering teams needed a feature only OpenVMS had, like the VMSDate 
timestamp used for NASA stellar drift calculations. Today the last 
clinging vestige of the x86 in corporate America is the engineering 
department. Why? Many of us doing embedded work still need an __actual__ 
serial port. Some equipment requires an __actual__ parallel port. 
Thankfully HP still has a few engineers specking out their hardware.

HP EliteDesk 705 Microtower with serial and parallel ports.
https://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/desktops/elitedesk-700-microtower-244031--1#!&tab=features

705 small form factor
https://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/desktops/elitedesk-700-small-form-factor-244032--1#!&tab=features

The downside for the x86 is that most of us are also starting to need 
CUDA for extreme localized crunching. At some point these machines will 
also switch to ARM and CUDA. When it comes to off-chip number crunching, 
CUDA won the war.




-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
http://www.infiniteexposure.net
http://www.johnsmith-book.com
http://www.logikalblog.com
http://www.interestingauthors.com/blog
http://lesedi.us/
http://onedollarcontentstore.com

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