Does IBM still use PowerPC?

[MC Morrado]

I was wondering if IBM still used the PowerPC architecture in their big servers and mainframes long after Apple ditched them for Intel in the 2000's. Due to Google and the advent of AI-generated slime, finding anything useful online is almost impossible. What is the latest/last thing IBM made with the PowerPC architecture?

[igormp]

Not really PowerPC, but its successors are still in use. Power10 is the current platform, and Power11 should be arriving really soon.

[OddOod]

Not a ton any more, but they still support them. 
They exited the chipmaking business back in '15

[igormp]

22 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Not a ton any more, but they still support them. 
They exited the chipmaking business back in '15

While they don't fab chips anymore, they still design new chips to fab with 3rd party fabs, not any different from AMD or Nvidia.

[Ha-Satan]

What kind of customers and workloads does IBM support these days? I remember seeing one of their engineers talking to Ian Cutress about the new Telum II chips but he was pretty vague about what sort of organizations are actually buying IBM servers/mainframes.

 

I guess what I'm asking is, in what sort of context does it make sense for organizations to go with IBM over x86-64 or ARM-based servers?

[starsmine]

Yes

https://newsroom.ibm.com/blog-ibm-power-modernizes-infrastructure-and-accelerates-innovation-with-ai-in-the-year-ahead

IBM makes powerPC(or rather, power, I conflate the two) servers as well as their Z mainframes for customers.

Juno Clipper, a satellite, that was just launched uses PowerPC in its RAD 750 Processer. Future satellites will use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 and the RAD510

[UNIXNETWORK]

I'd say IBM still use PowerPC same as Sun Microsystems still use Sparc CPU. But not for home consumers.

[Blue4130]

7 hours ago, Ha-Satan said:

What kind of customers and workloads does IBM support these days? I remember seeing one of their engineers talking to Ian Cutress about the new Telum II chips but he was pretty vague about what sort of organizations are actually buying IBM servers/mainframes.

 

I guess what I'm asking is, in what sort of context does it make sense for organizations to go with IBM over x86-64 or ARM-based servers?

Banks and stock market sector is probably the biggest. Aviation as well. I know my home city went IBM mainframe a while ago, pretty sure they still use it.

[FlyingPotato_is_taken]

Last time I heard IBM power was in context of the financial industry. Pretty interesting systems with more redundancy and reliability build in than most can make use of.

Wouldn't be surprised if scaled down version are used in weapon systems. 

 

Those IBM systems are also deployed in pretty high end datacentre. Some of those datacentre are older design which by coincident makes them to some extend even bomb proof (x stories below ground with thick reinforced concrete floor and walls in a nitrogen atmosphere). Think of them being designed in away where one room can be on fire without effecting the next room and if it utterly goes wrong  the sector/"half"/"quadrant" can be a complete loss without effecting the local datacentre and even if this datacentre goes down there is a georedundant one close by. Just in case.

 

Think of it as LTT Equinix tour on steroid's. 

[Blue4130]

19 minutes ago, FlyingPotato_is_taken said:

Think of it as LTT Equinix tour on steroid's. 

I would be very shocked if there were not some of those IBM systems in Equinix. That was a very cool tour vid.

[Henriok]

IBM most certainly still use and developer PowerPC. The PowerPC ISA spec is on version 3.1 by now, last implemented in Power10 a couple of years ago, and Power11 will be release this year. The confusion is that IBM deprecated the POWER ISA in 1996 with its POWER2-SC. After that, it's been PowerPC and just PowerPC in different versions and incarnations. Even if the brand name for their processors still was called POWER, the instruction set was PowerPC, and still is.

Their mainframes use a completely different architecture called Z, which is a CISC architecture, and is really strange compared to most ISAs anyone has heard of. ARM, x86, RISC-V and PowerPC has more in common that Z has to any one of them, especially when you add the operating system and application architectures to the system description.
 

IBM still has a lot of customers where reliability, scalability and security is of real concern. Such as not worrying about a compromized VM owning the whole data center, or you really need to have accuracy in your calculations beyond the 17:th decimal, and random cosmic rays won't crash and corrupt your data. So.. look for banks, insurance companies, government agencies, large logistics corporations, military organizations and such. And companies with legacy applications that has worked well for 30 years, and ran great on machines costing $30 million then, but runs great on entry level stuff now. 

[atxcyclist]

I wonder if they’re still producing the RAD750, a PowerPC processor shielded for use in space. 

[starsmine]

20 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

I wonder if they’re still producing the RAD750, a PowerPC processor shielded for use in space. 

They are not. there are almost none left for companies to buy.

The RAD510 has a compatibility mode (software) for RAD750 so customers do not have to change any of their code. 

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bae-systems-rad510-software-development-unit-now-available-for-order-302264031.html