Fleetwood Archives

For The Prices They Are A-Changin’

October 4, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the day, when IBM made any price changes to products, we would see these things in the weekly summary reports that its announcement system had compiled and sent out to us on a weekly basis for several decades. Somewhere along the way, either our profile changed without our knowledge or IBM changed something about this email blast system behind the scenes and we stopped seeing all of these Price Change announcements.

Just for the heck of it on Friday, which was a quiet news day in IBM i Land, I logged into the Web front end of the …
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IBM Drops Power10 Into Big, Bad Iron First

September 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

After a long, long wait – it has been nearly four years since the first Power9 machine was launched in the “Witherspoon” Power AC922 supercomputing node back in December 2017 based on the 24-core “Nimbus” Power9 processor and just over three years since the high-end “Fleetwood” Power E980 system debuted with the 12-core “Cumulus” Power9 variant – the first machines out of IBM based on the Power10 processor are being unveiled.

The expected three-year cadence between processor generations set by IBM a long time ago has worked out almost precisely for high-end Power Systems shops, with today’s launch of the …
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IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …
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Big Power News On The Horizon, And Some Other Stuff For Now

August 19, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We are awaiting a bunch of things coming out of Big Blue with regard to the Power Systems line, but the engineers are always tweaking the product line to meet customer demand even after things have been shipping for a while. So it is with the “Fleetwood” Power E980 system that IBM debuted last summer using the “Cumulus” 12-core, heavy thread variant of the Power9 processor family and the Enterprise Pool CPU capacity pooling software that runs on enterprise-class Power Systems iron.

But before we get into all of that, a reminder of what we are expecting to see from …
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Tweaking Systems And Withdrawal Symptoms

March 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A system product line does not always come out finished and complete, all at once, and its retirement from the sales catalog and the field is not always a simple and smooth thing, either. After a certain amount of criticism from its largest customers, Big Blue last year decided that it would get a little bit more orderly about the latter, as machines are withdrawn from marketing and eventually support. As for the former, well, there are always some nips and tucks that are done here and there as parts of the system are tweaked to meet specific customer demands. …
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Goosing Big Iron Power Systems With Power9 Migrations

December 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Power9-based servers from IBM’s Cognitive Systems division have been rolling out over the course of the past year, and the big iron has been in the field only since the late summer but has perhaps had the largest impact on the revenue and profit stream for the Power Systems line, excepting maybe the installation of the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

As has been the case since the AS/400 line debuted in 1988 and even with the combination of the System/36 (low-end and midrange) and System/38 …
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IBM Global Financing Deals To Push Power E950 And E980 Sales

September 24, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we have pointed out many times before, Big Blue is not just a creator and manufacturer of technology, but as one of the largest renters and lessors of equipment with vast access to capital and a relatively strong balance sheet, it is also effectively a large bank focused on IT. And more times than not, it takes IBM Global Financing – and the economic might that parent IBM brings to bear – to close the deal, as much as any hardware or software technology does.

At the moment, IBM is focused on increasing sales of the midrange “Zeppelin” and …
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IBM Sunsets Big Iron Power8 Engines As Power9 Engines Loom

July 23, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue must be getting an itchy launch finger for the high end of the Power Systems lineup, and you can usually tell the company is ready to launch the new thing when it starts warning customers they better get their checkbooks out to buy the old thing while it is still available.

In announcement letter A18-0567, which came out on July 17, the warning was a bit shorter than usual, and we are not sure why. Perhaps IBM meant to give a warning and didn’t realize it was running out of certain Power8 processors aimed at Power E880 …
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Power9 Big Iron “Fleetwood/Mack” Rumors

October 9, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sometimes, the universe just hands you a great title, like that one above. As the Power9 platform is rolling out across the field to various launch pads, with entry, midrange, and high-end systems in the works, word always inevitably leaks out about what Big Blue has planned with its future systems.

In the case of the high-end machines, we are hearing rumors that the current top-end Power E880 and its half-pint Power E870, which went by the code-name “Brazos” within IBM, likely in deference to the river in New Mexico, will be replaced by a machine code-named “Fleetwood,” no doubt …
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