The new IBM machine is, of course, named after the tallest mountain in North America, which is in Alaska and which rises 20,194 feet above sea level. There are, of course, a selection of four-socket and eight-socket servers based on the Cooper Lake Xeon SPs and UPI from the major OEMs and ODMs as well, but this is not truly big iron as we know it. It has basically come down to IBM with the 16-socket Power E1080 and with the future 16-socket System z16 based on the “Telum” processor we told you about a few weeks ago, the Superdome Flex machines from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, based on a mix of the HP Superdome X and SGI NUMAlink 8 technologies, and their companion Superdome Flex 280 machines that use Intel’s “Cooper Lake” Xeon SP 8380H processors with their integrated UltraPath Interconnect (UPI) NUMA implementetion. And in fact, there are fewer and fewer manufacturers of these NUMA systems. We don’t see a lot of big iron around these datacenter parts anymore. So it is with a certain amount of enthusiasm that we have been anticipating the launch of IBM’s first server based on its “Cirrus” Power10 chip: the “Denali” Power E1080 system. And we like big iron, just like we like muscle cars and beater trucks. And we never forget the important place that big, fat, shared memory NUMA systems still play in the spectrum of compute in the datacenter. While we are big fans of distributed computing systems here at The Next Platform, we never forget our heritage in big iron.

Ibm system p5 serial connection speeds