By Stephen Shankland, 15 July 2003 08:26
NEWS IBM is hiring more programmers to beef up work on Linux for its Power line of processors. IBM has put more muscle behind its effort to improve Linux for its Power family of processors, adding dozens of programmers to Big Blue's Linux Technology Centre with plans to hire more. "We hadn't been doing enough to fully enable Linux" on Power processors, the chip line used in IBM's pSeries Unix servers and its iSeries of midrange servers, said Dan Frye, director of the Linux Technology Centre. "Linux runs pretty well today on Power. We want to take it from pretty good to world class." The number of programmers at IBM's Linux Technology Centre rose from about 250 to more than 300 as a result of the shift, Frye said. The new programmers at the centre had already been working on "Linux on Power" elsewhere in the company, but IBM also will hire more developers for the task, Frye said. Programmers will work on a variety of tasks: speeding Linux on Power, fleshing out support for hardware such as storage systems, enabling the use of service processors that help manage a server, and boosting features for higher-end systems with many processors. "You will see over time that SMP (symmetrical multiprocessor) size on Power will be in advance of SMP size on Intel," Fry said. The move, announced to employees last week, illustrates the still-increasing importance of the operating system to IBM. It also shows that the company can't rely as much on the broader open-source programming community to support its own chip line. IBM's Power chips are vying against AMD's Opteron and Athlon64, Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc and Intel's Itanium for attention in the market for 64-bit processors, which can gracefully manage vast amounts of memory. The Power line has recently grown to include the PowerPC 970, used in Apple Computer's new Power Mac G5 and in IBM's Power blade servers, which are due to arrive in the second half of 2003. Stephen Shankland writes for CNET News.com
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