If IBM’s latest strategy takes hold, the way we all think about processors is about to change. I don’t think the industry at large is quite ready to think in the new terms. I certainly wasn’t, but then again it’s been about a decade since I directly covered IBM and its servers.
When I went to IBM’s press event last week in New York, I saw the same faces I did 10 years ago. Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Nicholas Donofrio still are heading up the server operations – a bit grayer, perhaps, but also proud of their accomplishments since launching the Power RISC processor in 1990.
I expected the kind of processor announcement I would have attended back then – speeds, feeds, capabilities of a new generation of processor. And in fact, rumors were swirling before the event that IBM’s highly anticipated Power5 would officially be unveiled. (It wasn’t.)
But IBM had a different story altogether. Over the past decade, the company apparently has learned from open movements such as Linux and Java and now is asking how these philosophies might be applied to processors.
The reason for the openness is this: IBM has seen the writing on the wall. The processor speed increases we’ve become accustomed to are going to become physically impossible because those advances stem from making transistors ever smaller. Eventually, you’re dealing with individual atoms, and you can’t get smaller than that.
There is still, however, a way to make applications run faster: Move the applications into the chip itself.
That’s where the open initiative comes in. Third parties can license IBM’s Power chip design, add in their own application-specific magic and produce a new chip with all the goodness baked right in.
Think of network gear that’s fast because it uses a RISC processor and ASIC chips – only the gear is even faster because the RISC processor and ASICs are now one and the same chip, cutting down on communications time between the different elements in the box.
IBM has its work cut out for it in explaining this brave new world of processors. The company last week talked about education and released tools to help developers. But it’s a long road from here to the thriving ecosystems we’ve seen with Linux and Java, and these are only first steps. In the meantime, the world is still waiting for Power5.
