Why do they need so many threads? This really feels like they just designed the cpu poorly, in that it can't extract enough parallelism out of the instruction stream already.
(Intel and AMD stopped at 2! Apparently more wasn't worth it for them. Presumably because the cpu was doing enough of the right thing already.)
I suspect part of it is licensing games, both in the sense of "avoiding per core license limits" which absolutely matters when your DB is costing a million bucks, and also in the 'enable the highest PVU score per chassis' for ibm's own license farming.
Power systems tend not to be under the same budget constraints as intel, whether thats money, power, heat, whatever, so the cost benifit of adding more sub-core processing for incremental gains is likely different too.
I may have a raft of issues with IBM, and aix, but those Power chips are top notch.
The aggressively common pipe-delimited sproc output (the standard hack to get around commas being common in strings, instead of finding a legitimate data format) is another clear example of the brain damage the poor DBA incurs through constant investment in “modern” relational databases.
Right now the DB I'm paid to babysit provides cli tools that flip between tabular and k/v list output without making that configurable, or a tabular form that doesn't include headers, or a 3rd party tool that will, but has the spectacularly annoying "error on line 1 : multi-line query" issue. Or things that are slow or only talk via generic protocols like odbc etc etc etc
I think you're being a little unfair about the pipe delimited thing though, it's a least worst compromise based on who we're providing the data too - non technical business people, the vast majority of whom use excel or similar tools and couldn't even tell you what "data format" means, let alone configure their systems to parse something else.
Personally I had a bit of an epiphany around the ascii delimiters (us/fs/rs/gs) which work extremely well when the data is ascii/utf-8, and make data interchange between shell cli tools very easy. But they've also invisible and little business software supports them in a friendly way. Telling someone in accounts or market to "use octal 034" helps no one.
And I've resigned myself to using multiple tools, dev with tool 1 with decent error messages, tool 2 for production use because it can actually produce sane output formats.
What I don't have a choice on is which db we use, and it's not modern or cool and honest most things don't even have drivers for it