Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy
chipsandcheese.com
Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike a…

saw this kicking around on the lobsters frontpage

IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator

ah yes. an AI accelerator. for a chip that goes into a system that’ll quite possibly have a lifespan measured in decade-partials. in environments so extremely up to date with the bleeding edge of technology that they are absolutely not losing their programmers to retirement. an AI acceleator for that. makes total sense.

imagine being the poor engineers who had to spec that out, design it, and get it actually existing. nevermind even the awe-inspiringly stunning disregard to reality that it takes for some management fuckhead(s) to have “steered” this

Funny enough, I asked why IBM had different terminology compared to the rest of the industry. They said IBM came up with the terminology first, and later on the industry adopted different terminology. It was all lighthearted and funny.

ah yes! funny! haha. not at all some weird insular shit from the same company that runs a worlds-apart platform with a control grip so strong it makes larry ellison check if they’re infringing on anything actionable…

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    13·
    3 months ago

    that ai accelerator will be used to spit out believably-looking but fucked up in subtle ways cobol. that’s job security with a side of eldritch horrors

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      haha I did try to ponder what the “LLMs, but cobol” corp world would look like but I couldn’t really think of anything particularly good, although this might be one

      the other I thought of is:

      1. bank: “we have an innovative AI/ML/adaptive-fraud-response(/other bullshit term of art here) research team, leading the way with novel research in methodologies for detecting {…}”
      2. dept researchers throw some papers and jupyter notebooks over the wall
      3. suits up top say “okay now make it work”
      4. some poor bastard has to figure out how to glue cobol and jupyter together on systemz in some way that doesn’t get them fired or risk millions/minute

      I’m sure it’ll all go perfectly well