15 Feb
2019
15 Feb
'19
9:03 p.m.
There was quite a bit of difference up until POWER6 although each
generation came closer and closer together. It wasn?t just the IOPs, the
systems had different management controllers, cases, expansion enclosures,
etc as late as POWER5 and only ran AIX in LPARs or PASE.
The early PowerPC 400s were PowerPC-AS chips designed in Rochester, MN
whereas most other POWER and PowerPC work was an Austin, TX creation.
Rochester did the RS64 family of processors which were very nice low power
chips that also introduced ?hyperthreading? and other advanced technologies
but these were offered in RS/6000s as well for commercial workloads (DB,
web services).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RS64
On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 7:02 PM Paul Berger via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 2019-02-15 4:04 p.m., Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, 15 Feb 2019 at 19:27, Paul Berger via
cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Only the very first RISC based AS/400s where really different hardware,
by the turn of the century when the second generation of RS64 / Power3
systems where coming along there was already a lot of common hardware
between AS/400or iSeries and RS/6000 or pSeries only by Power5 time the
hardware was all the same except iSeries was still clinging to the IOP
but even that went away with Power 6 and even the support for Twinax WSC
is gone now since the last ones where PCI.
Paul.
Knowledge Center refers to it as IBM i, but it is
not the name of a
system it is just the name of another OS that runs on IBM Power systems
and can even be vitalized on a system with other OSes.
IBM moved the AS/400 onto
POWER processors. The TIMI (sp?) firmware
made this doable and binaries were portable from the old hardware. The
OS was renamed i5/OS.
Later they replaced the proprietary POWER hardware with generic POWER
servers, and they renamed the OS to IBM i.
IBM supports 3 OSes on POWER servers now: AIX, Linux and IBM i.
Silly name, though.