Over at The Register, Dan Olds looks at how IBM’s potential sale of their x86 business to Lenovo would affect Big Blue’s HPC business.
As a share of IBM’s total sales to the Top500, typical x86 boxes are the largest segment in terms of system count at 33 per cent. These are IBM’s M3/M4 and other traditional rackmount “pizza box” systems. The vast majority are dual-socket Xeon-based servers that can be found in pretty much every data centre in the world. Interestingly enough, 43 out of 63 of these systems reside in China and are used by Internet service providers. So if some sort of IBM-Lenovo asset sales takes place, Lenovo will have a home court advantage with these customers – and increase its presence on the Top500 list from a single system to 40+.
