... we aim for the maximum flexibility. You can change something, the software will still run."
Soltis points out the virtues of that way of working and the problems that can occur. "I really give credit to Intel for developing an architecture in the 70s that still works. Xeon is fine. Then they developed Itanium with HP and they put in a RISC processor and that is great but then you look at the trade-offs. You have to change your software to work with Itanium and that is the trade-off. Changing the software is expensive."
Soltis' design goals are all around avoiding trade-offs. "The iSeries goes from small to very large and you don't have to change anything." Virtualisation is one of Soltis' key themes but always within the context of efficiency.
You soon get the impression that this is a man who hates inefficiency and the subject moves on to processor design, which Soltis freely admits is not his field. "But you look at processors and everything is about [clock] speed," says Soltis. "But we know we are up against a speed limit. To get that speed the circuits are so small that they are only a few atoms across and are so small and they run so fast they can't carry a signal so what do you get — heat. Our processors aren't the fastest in megahertz, or gigahertz, but the systems run faster than you expect."
It's all about the right architecture, he says. And the trade-offs; and at this point, Soltis moves back to the Xbox. "A games system is all about performance, but in a different way from a business system. In a games system it is the front-end bus that is important. On a business system that can be as much as 800MBps. On the [Xbox 360] it is 31GBps. But the software to use that is not here yet and that takes time for people to catch-up. It is a trade-off."
Games machine or mainframe system, Soltis will talk with authority and enthusiasm on the architecture of either. And that goes for supercomputers as well. The Rochester realm under Soltis developed IBM's Blue Gene which is "exploring the frontiers in supercomputing, computer architecture and in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems" and "in the use of computation to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding". Soltis sees it as dealing with the same issues as in an Xbox or an iSeries machine, just with different trade-offs.
"Supercomputing is fascinating because the architecture is one where the performance is the most important thing and how much it costs is less important" he says.
Now Soltis is focused on the next five years at IBM. The architectures from desktop to supercomputer are all working in the way he wanted with maximum efficiency and minimum redundancy. IBM's customers are happy, at lease with the workhorse iSeries, which, according to Soltis "grew 25 percent last year, which is not bad".
Soltis admits that he finds his role at IBM a "great responsibility" but gives every appearance of enjoying what he is doing, if it wasn't for the travelling. After London, he must visit the troops in more foreign corners. Is he looking forward to getting back to Minnesota? "Oh I am," he says.
Talkback
For 8 years, from its initial B series release to the E series, the AS400 and I worked together every day.
I may have rose colored glasses here, but through all its incarnations, the damn thing just ran. And ran. And no matter what you threw at it, no matter the semi-regular Cumulative Tapes <kume-tapes>", the precursor to today's never-ending Service Packs, you overlayed on it (generally to enhance it, not fix it!), it hardly ever crashed, hardlly ever needed even a reboot - it continued to churn away 24/7 doing that "dirty, boring work" that no company could survive without. Perhaps it was the proprietary-ness, perhaps it was the lack of flashy lights and pretty GUIs - or perhaps it was just designed by a quality engineer with a single purpose, to do a job and do it well.
I was not alone here - every time you bumped into another AS/400 engineer or operator, the same story. The bloody thing works. Despite IBM's perception that everything with the blue badge is way over-priced, no one ever seemed to complain about the AS/400's bang-for-buck.
Unfortunately time marched on and we needed to follow the Gate's model of future computing. So, are we better off?
The AS/400 served its masters well then, and it still does now, by all accounts. I must say, dealing each day with seemingly never ending system fails or almost daily patching, I miss that stability - and confidence.
Mr Soltis, take a bow.