Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor’s design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform’s established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory.

↫ IBM press release

IBM is still doing some amazing chip architecture design. ServeTheHome has more details of how this works:

A key choice here is that IBM implemented AArch64 in full hardware rather than through translation. This design uses a little-endian Arm implementation alongside big-endian z/Architecture, with AArch64 v9.3, SVE and SVE2 support, and 2,792 implemented AArch64 instructions. IBM also claims Arm SystemReady compliance, which matters for how much off-the-shelf Arm software this core can absorb. This is absolutely crazy technology. Arm software sees a native Arm processor. Arm runs unmodified, out-of-the-box, and onto a standard Arm platform. IBM said the 2792 AArch64 instructions are more than twice the Z instructions. IBM made a funny quip about “reduced” in RISC.

↫ Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome

This is bonkers technology. We can only dream of this ever serving a home.

Today, I wanted to show you one of the most fascinating and surprising operating systems ever created. It’s not another Unix, Linux, or Windows. It is an architecture that went its own way and proved that systems engineering design can look completely different.

I’m talking about IBM’s child, which for many might be synonymous with “boring banking systems,” but in reality, is one of the most uncompromising projects in IT history. While we get excited about abstraction and virtualization today, thinking we are discovering new lands, this system was doing it decades ago. Imagine a system that doesn’t know the concept of a “file” in the way we understand it. A system where everything is an object, and all disk and operational memory form one vast, flat space. If you are looking for proof that true engineering doesn’t need buzzwords to blow you away, I invite you to read on.

↫ Kamil Pytliński

Ever since watching Clabretro’s detailed video about getting IBM i to work on his own IBM POWER hardware and then remoting into them, I’ve been obsessed with running IBM i at home. It feels like the final boss of operating systems to dive into and explore, hidden in the deepest, darkest trenches of the ocean of technology. Everything about IBM i feels alien, complex, convoluted, opaque, and overwhelming, and you can probably dedicate your entire career to working with this platform and somehow still learn new things about it every day.

There’s something brutalist about IBM i, and I so desperately want to bang my head on its concrete walls.