ARM in play again

ARM in play again

I was interested to learn that ARM is in play again, although curious to learn that Nvidia might be its suitor, and even more interested to learn that Nvidia has overtaken Intel as the world’s largest chip fab. How did that happen? Nvidia sell on consoles as well as PC/laptops and games platforms are it seems another good whose demand has been boosted by CV19 and that the global demand for cycles has been driven by HPC and AI recently where the Nvidia  are competing architecturally with Intel, although they need a CPU to complete their portfolio. It may be a better fit than I’d thought.

I have to laugh a bit, as Intel drove the final RISC players out of the market by leveraging the volume of the consumer product design, and it would seem, have been bitten in the arse by the same thing. These products require volume, and production will coalesce towards the low price duopoly.

ARM was bought by Softbank, for £24bn cash, just under 4 years ago; they are a Japanese venture/hedge fund which has famously had it its own problems. I wonder what they did with the money as some of their principals are now bleating for state protection as Nvidia is a allegedly an inappropriate owner of the chip designers. The Verge heralded it as another proof that intellectual property has value. The Register reports that the big stake holders have been insuring themselves against losing access to the intellectual property.

In this article on the BBC, they returned to Herman Hauser, one of ARM’s founders, who voted against the deal in 2016 who shares his fears for access to the technology of bought by another market participant, and possibly the decommitment to the Cambridge campus, which is a security of supply issue, but this Govt. is unlikely to do much and it should be safer owned by someone who wants the ideas rather than an organisation which just considers it a red-ink line in the P&L. …

Making Sybase Scream

This article is about running Sybase on a sophisticated UNIX. It discusses sizing Sybase’s max engines parameter, the effect of resource management tools & leveraging UNIX & Consolidation. Also note that this is not a Sun Blueprint, its meant to show you that you can, not how to.  …

Consolidating Sybase

This is/was a short note on design options available when creating multi-tenancy solutions for Sybase hosted applications. It looks at server sprawl, multi-database and multi server patterns. It examines Sybase workspaces and Solaris name space partitioning tools. When designing system platforms for Sybase based applications, three patterns are available. …

Consolidation & Sybase

I wrote up some notes on how to run multiple Sybase instances in a single system image. When I originally wrote it, I was pretty much the world expert on the subject. The article explored a couple of basic Sybase consolidation techniques and the UNIX and Solaris technologies that support consolidation.  It was one of the first articles I published on davelevy.info, as a download. As I prepared for the version file look and feel update in 2015, I had decided that it was no longer of much help and so did not bring it forward to the new downloads page, although the download permalink is still supported. …

Consolidation – The importance of a cost meta-model

On blogs.sun.com, I posted an article about some of the theory behind the Data Centre Economics offerings I and colleagues were working on. The exercises were designed to model the costs of an infrastructure platform and show the profitability of implementing, smaller, faster & cheaper systems. I made this into white paper format, available here…, the original article, without the graphic remains available at the sun/oracle site, here….

Is it still worth reading? Not so sure. See the first comment …