I've referred to my Claude as Herr Doktor Professor Klaus Klaude since last spring. Obviously in reference to the German fascination with wearing multi-titles as honorifics
Assuming things are configured correctly, the TPM would only provide the key to unlock the drive if the correct OS has been booted. Attempting to boot from a live usb to have a look at the data wouldn't work, since the TPM wouldn't present the key required.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Server hardware comes with VGA, because everything in the server room (think KVM switches, external remote KVM, local 19" consoles) is built with VGA. And that will be the case as long as server hardware comes with VGA.
I will be very surprised if it doesn't start switching over to USB-C over the next decade or two. Having a single port capable of doing the entire local KVM dance using readily-available hardware is just a no-brainer.
Some switches have already started using USB-C for serial instead of RJ45. When the technician is 100% already carrying a smartphone and C-to-C cable to charge it, making the console available with zero additional adapters is quite attractive.
So, display out from USB-C cable is not display signal over USB 3.x digital signal, it's just an electronic analog patch-through to GPU. The pins in the port actually run raw DisplayPort signals when that feature is activated. So you can't plug a laptop to a server and get nicely packetized screen frames out over the USB host hardware. This is often not clearly communicated...
You can put a USB to RS232C or USB to Ethernet adapter behind the port to then expose ttyS0 or to serve a management webpage, that could happen, but I think the DB-9 and/or RGB would have to stay in that case.
ARM has better software support for AI applications and half of their presentation was about their inference accelerators that can go in the mainframes (and POWER machines).
IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits.
Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.
Mainframes are exquisitely "balanced" machines that match processing capacity and IO for a relatively small set of workloads. You won't see mainframes doing scientific number crunching or AI training, but you'll increasingly see them adding more AI inference into their transaction processing workloads for things like fraud and anomaly detection. While their CPUs are prodigiously fast (the one announced is designed to run at 5.7 GHz, and the cores themselves are huge compared to other architectures), a lot of emphasis is placed on the IO systems that connect the machine to storage and other systems so that the CPU is busy all the time. It's very normal to run a mainframe at close to 100% CPU utilization.
The funny thing is that Fujitsu has a sizable enterprise IT business, and their Primergy servers are very good, so why don't they offer their own ARM CPUs?
At least back in the day, there was talk about Nvidia + ppc64le. Wasn't there even a supercomputer with that setup? But I guess that has fallen by the wayside.
We have some older Power9 with NVIDIA V100. Nvidia drivers stopped a while ago (before V100 were considered “old” also for x86_64).
The main problem is software support by most machine learning libraries. While it is normal to have to compile many things from source when the binary is not provided even by some third party, in some cases the software will not compile on ppc64le and surely is not tested to work.
I would probably suck at marketing, and my personal preferences and convictions have no bearing here, I guess.
With that out of the way, I hate this kind of vague messaging. Yeah, the product will... somehow enable me to achieve some vague goal. Okay. Why don't you slap some screen-filling pictures of happy people in an office on there while you're at it, Mr. Marketing. I'll probably just close the tab and move on. I need substance and details, and I don't have the patience to go digging in your stupid feel-good marketing material for 20 minutes!
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