Stuck with single-thread performance

It seems that somebody else had the same thought about IBM's Power strategy.

They are stuck with single-thread performance, as there is still a lot of COBOL code out there, that just don't run multi-threaded.

ITJungle.com writes:

Just based on clock speeds alone and the improved efficiency that IBM is promising in terms of instructions processed per clock comparing Power5 and Power6 chips, I would have expected a lot more oomph out of the Power6 designs. Somewhere between 30 percent and 45 percent more work for a 114 percent increase in clock speed just does not seem like a smart trade--or a fair one. Particularly when all of IBM's competitors are throwing four or eight cores on a chip and trying to lower clock speeds to save on heat and to get memory and CPU speeds closer to each other and thereby boost the efficiency of their processors.

This approach, from IBM's point of view, has two problems. It presupposes that applications are multithreaded and can spread work out over more cores. Batch jobs and single-threaded RPG, COBOL, and C++ applications can't take as much advantage of extra cores.

Of course, not all problems can be parallelized, so there will still be demand for chips with high single-thread performance and few cores (POWER6 has two).

But presumably, the market for multi-core chips will grow faster, now that Intel and AMD are going multi-core (AMDs 4-Core Barcelona should be here in September).

IBM's decision to still go with only to cores per chip, seems strange, as they were the first ones to bring dual-core CPUs to the market.

I've got a green brain

Your Brain is Green

Of all the brain types, yours has the most balance. You are able to see all sides to most problems and are a good problem solver. You need time to work out your thoughts, but you don't get stuck in bad thinking patterns. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the future, philosophy, and relationships (both personal and intellectual).

What Color Is Your Brain?

Circle of Trust

The movie "Meet the parents" features a system called "circle of trust".

The idea of the system is that between all members of the circle, there are no secrets.

This is a great analogy when comparing it to computers and networks.

At the beginning, when you install your first computer, you don't trust anyone. As soon as you plug in your network cable, you start trusting the network switch and its peers.

This goes on and on. Here are some examples:

-Installing another users public-key/trusting another hosts fingerprint
-Installing a management agent of a systems management tool running as root
-Same goes for backup-agents, CMDB-tools, or any other 3rd party software.

You might want to keep the circle of trust as small as possible. This should keep all the Fockers out :-)

What are Software Packages?

This is just a reminder, what software packages are (from Wikipedia):

"A software package is a bundle of one or several files that either are necessary for the execution of a computer program, or add features for a program already installed on the computer or network of computers."

Packages should _NOT_ configure itself. Better let a configuration engine like puppet or bcfg2 do the job.

The configuration of a self-configuring package is often lost. It is better to save a configuration somewhere centrally (for ITIL freaks in the CMDB).