IBM's recent earnings release - lower revenues but higher earnings - brings to mind an old saying "You can't save your way to prosperity." Perhaps some cutbacks may turn out to be short-sighted, but those that challenge/change business fundamentals may yield long lasting benefit.
Locales suffering IBM's "stealth layoffs," under the guise of "resource rebalancing," may bemoan the shift of employment offshore. But, the merging of "z," "p," and "i" design engineers allows more frequent product refreshes across all server platforms.
Designing a complex system does take many years. Mainframes used to see significant updates every 5+ years, but now that mainframes leverage POWER building blocks, IBM has indicated that its next mainframe update is targeted for 2010, just a couple years after its 2008 introduction of z10.
Back in the pre-90s mainframe heyday, IBM had multiple overlapped design teams – while one was wrapping up a design, another was in the midst of design and yet another was exploring alternatives for the next, future design. As one design finished, engineers were shifted onto a future design. The overlapped teams meant that a new system could be released twice as often than if there were only a single team. Over the years, cost cutting reduced mainframe engineers from 2.5 teams to something like 1.5 teams, which lengthened the introduction of new architecture.
That overlapping team approach is still used for complex chip designs like IBM's POWER. The POWER5/5+ team had a different crew of engineers than the POWER6/6+ team. The POWER7 team picked up some of the POWER5 guys while the POWER6/6+ guys were still hard at work. POWER8 is now the skeleton exploration team. Sure, there is a cadre of gurus who oversee all, but the grunt work involves overlapping teams of engineers. Like clockwork, the overlapped POWER teams have introduced new designs every 3 years (POWER4=2001, POWER5=2004, POWER6=2007, POWER7 promised for 2010) with speed-bump midlife-kickers in between.
The mainframe continues to support an instruction set architecture (ISA) that has evolved over the past 40+ years while steadily maintaining backwards compatibility. It is clearly not the same ISA as POWER, with its RISC roots. But, ISA aside, there are a lot of common functions – cache hierarchies, memory interfaces, even execution units (IEEE floating point, Decimal floating point, etc.) – that can be leveraged between POWER RISC and mainframe CISC. That's just what happened with z10 – a bit of unique mainframe ISA design coupled with some fundamental cache/memory building blocks.
In 2010, the same design leverage is expected. POWER7 is promised for staggered 2010 rollout across Power Systems UNIX servers. And, IBM's recent earnings call indicated that the next mainframe launch will also be in 2010. Downsizing the number of design teams is truly heartbreaking for now unemployed system designers. But, combining design teams across products and leveraging fundamental building blocks has allowed IBM to reduce its costs and still deliver timely product refreshes.
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