Of somewhat uncertain significance, IBM announced that they were merging their Semiconductor (PowerPC) and Server groups together with "hopes that by working closer together the two will help each other improve their product lines."
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IBM Merges Server and Chip Groups
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Re: will it help?
Or maybe light a fire under the chip division's posterior to make better chips faster so the server division can sell better servers than everyone else.
Or maybe light a fire under the chip division's posterior to make better chips faster so the server division can sell better servers than everyone else.
I'd be lovely to see, but I doubt it at the moment. x86 for better or worse is the standard for low-end servers, so until that changes you can bet that IBM will be there with it.
I think Opterons are coming out for IBM's Blades. But those wishing to waste their money on Xeons should not be denied the opportunity to do so.
IBM has only recently started offering Opteron servers, and I believe they intend to broaden the range of Opteron servers. It takes a while to transition product lines. The Opteron is still relatively new.
Unlike the Xeon SMP systems (or the PPC970 for that matter), the Opteron is actually a ccNUMA system that is masquerading as simple SMP. What this means for practical purposes is that the Opteron can scale almost linearly out to about 8 processors using its current chipset before performance starts to trail off, particularly if the OS is NUMA aware (and NUMA-aware Linux and Windows kernels will be available shortly, if not already available). By contrast, simple SMP only scales well to two processors typically. Hence why quad processor Xeons aren't all that popular; the additional performance you get doesn't live up to either theory or price.
Intel will give competitive performance on single and dual processor servers, but once you get into 4+ processor servers, the Opteron will start to really standout in terms of real world scalability. Interestingly, ccNUMA systems tend to be slower than simple SMP for dual processor systems, but the memory latency is so low on the Opteron that its ccNUMA performance is similar to the real performance of competing simple SMP chipsets in dual processor configurations.
I wasn't aware that IBM had a consolidated server division. I still was under the impression that they had separate zSeries, iSeries, pSeries and xSeries divisions, and the 970 powered JS20 was the first collaboration beweeen the two latter.