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Power PC is pretty much dead - also screw the employees

Jimzz

Jimzz

Diamond Member
So IBM has canned just about everyone tied to the power PC design today. Server group is for sale from what I have been told as well.

I guess this is why they changed the 401k match last year. They laid off all the people and don't have to put money into that now.

No profanity in thread titles, even in OT.
-ViRGE
 
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Jimzz said:
So IBM has canned just about everyone tied to the power PC design today. Server group is for sale from what I have been told as well.

I guess this is why they changed the 401k match last year. They laid off all the people and don't have to put money into that now.
Click to expand...

I'm confused as I have no idea the impact this has.
 
always thought it was hilarious when ibm said they weren't going to cater to apple and weren't worried about losing macs because consoles were much bigger market
 
PowerPC was done when Apple switched to x86. There were a lot of problems with the G5's thermals and power consumption. Basically, it couldn't be used in laptops. Xenon has the same problems in the Xbox 360. Ran too hot for the type of cooling Microsoft was using.

Cell I think was also a flop. It had great success in the PS3, though never achieved anywhere near the success IBM hoped for. Thing was too difficult to program for. Cheap multi-core x86 chips and GPGPU basically eliminated the need for a CPU based APU. Both Microsoft and Sony switched to x86 for their next gen. Just the Wii U using PowerPC now. A lot of Linux distros have discontinued support for it. Mac OS X hasn't since Leopard.

Not sure what's happening on the server side. A lot of folks seem to be eying low power ARM cores to cut heat and energy use.
 
Haven't heard the term "PowerPC" in many years. Why is this important and relevant today?
 
Wow... that's a bummer.

That said, nobody outside of IBM really wants to use Power PC processors anymore. Apple stopped using them years ago, and both Sony and Microsoft will be switching to AMD x86 processors for the next generation of their consoles.

That said, who is going to be designing the next generation processors for the Z series mainframes and P series UNIX servers? They aren't just planning on killing off those cash cows... are they?

By the way... what is IBM's 401k match nowadays? When I worked there, it was 100% up to the first 6% of your salary. That was MUCH more generous than most Fortune 500 companies are now, which means that I knew that they were going to cut it some day.
 
The match was "adjusted" last year. Now they do a yearly lump match near the end of the year. Of course if you are not working at that time you don't get it. So all the laid off employees will not get any match this year.


Inside rumor is Lenovo is looking to buy the server group. But still early and shopping it around.
 
Heh... maybe Dell should buy it. That would basically leave us with HP or Dell as our two big choices for buying servers... or Oracle if you have more money than brains 🙂
 
The power core was being used in a lot of BtoB items. I can't go into it just in case it opens up the few I know that did not get cut. But the problem is IBM was just milking the power groups and now there is not much left.

So toss out the people that made it and don't even give them their 401k match, let alone the pension they were promised when hired.
 
Any links? POWER or PowerPC? POWER systems are still being sold, with many systems installed and running now. I'm interested in the details.
 
IBM sank a billion or more into PowerPC attempting to keep it alive, relevant, and competitive. Its really quite amazing it was not sold or spun off a decade ago. IOW, employees should be thankful they didn't cross this bridge years ago.
 
Only "major" player left using anything related to this is Nintendo, with consoles in general having moved to ARM and/or x86. I'm sure with this announcement, this means Nintendo's next console has already committed to using something other than IBM-based CPU's.
 
It's been a while since I've seen a new IBM product.

What are they making/doing these days?
 
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