17 ms·

How IBM Stacks Up Power8 Against Xeon Servers

73 points by baazaar 11y ago

ausjke 11y ago
Too late for the game. Power should do this way earlier. The Linux community was booming around PowerPC a few years back and now all the brains left to work on either ARM or x86. Without that community support(Power does not really run Windows), the chip is just a piece of cold hardware even though it can shine spotty in the spec. One of Power's biggest user is probably a licensee in China, who replaced its crypto logic and use it for their own needs, but that's far from enough to compete against Xeon.
- teepo 11y ago
  It's all about Linux. IBM's running Power8 with RedHat in SoftLayer data centers. Hadoop and jboss are some of the target workloads.
  - bluedino 11y ago
    The ERP product we use has gone from an iSeries native product to a Linux version, it's so much faster it's not funny.
  - ctstover 11y ago
    I remember the announcements back in May, but I still don't see an offering on their site. Can one really get a Linux instance on Power by the hour / month in SL? Even better in my case would be just a VPS, as a build node does need a monster server. At the same time, if they are "using it behind the scenes", yet not offering it to customers, that would be very bad for brand image. Isn't the crux of the selling points server consolidation? Which of course is the same exact thing "cloud provider". I still haven't tried it, but siteox.com has it though.
    - pm90 11y ago
      IBM is a enterprise behemoth. If you look at their sources of revenues, they focus a lot more on B2B with a few selected spinoffs designed to generate some public interest. Its not surprising they don't publicize a lot of things they do.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  Based on my work Power processors are simply the backbone of AIX and iSeries machines and perform very well in those applications. The interesting part is that either platform can move off the Power processor to another, the least impacted from a business perspective would be iSeries as the layer above the machine level is independent and would simply rebuild programs without customer intervention beyond upgrading the OS
alyandon 11y ago
So my question is - how much extra power does the IBM Power8 cpu need in order to get performance that is on par with Intel's Haswell?
- kev009 11y ago
  Look at the memory bandwidth numbers. These completely outclass the Xeon in certain types of workloads, apples to oranges.
  - ksec 11y ago
    I thought after all these years and improvement Intel is invisible in performance. Turns out i was wrong. Although I would still buy Intel Chips for future prove. IBM is simply too incompetent to compete.
    - dorfsmay 11y ago
      Until about 5 years ago the Power architecture dominated in the CPU performance domain. Saying "IBM is too incompetetent" makes you sound like you don't really know this market.
      - Tinyyy 11y ago
        Hey, I wanna know more, can you elaborate?
        wtallis 11y ago
        Intel's only got the ability to develop one microarchitecture family. When they try for more than one, things fall through the cracks and you get the Pentium 4 dead-end or the Atom's lackluster performance. Intel's primary microarchitecture is aimed at laptops. It scales reasonably down to large tablet power levels and up to workstation power levels. For the high-performance server market, they can only throw cores and cache at the problem, with some enterprise features bolted on. IBM's always targeted the high-performance server market. For a while, their Power cores were also being used for workstations and even a desktop by Apple, but that's never been the focus. They include things like decimal arithmetic and SMT and hardware transactional memory and they've been selling the high-end parts at 4-5GHz speeds for a long time.
groupmonoid 11y ago
By looking at the IBM-provided benchmarks, it looks like the new Power8 is better. But are there any independent benchmarks out there already?
- TheCondor 11y ago
  It probably doesn't matter, they aren't better enough. Now if IBM sold these maybe 30% cheaper, it could be a different story
eliben 11y ago
The almost $3K price tag on a "Linux OS" is disturbing
- nabla9 11y ago
  Why you find it disturbing that someone wants to pay for OS support?
  - eliben 11y ago
    That's a lot for supporting a free OS on a single server
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - krylon 11y ago
      I think they assumed these servers would run RHEL, which is not cheap, especially on non-x86(_64) architectures.
    - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
      It comes with an engineer's phone number.
jmnicolas 11y ago
My inner geek is longing for an affordable Power8 desktop machine ... do I NEED it ? Well ... you know ...
- Quequau 11y ago
  I hear you man! It's a shame that there's never been a reasonably priced ATX POWER mainboard available to individuals without a major service contract with IBM. Even that barebones dev server offer through OpenPower was over priced.
graycat 11y ago
Question: I looked up the price of an 18 core Xeon processor, with a clock speed under 3.0 GHz, and got $4000+. So, why be willing to pay so much per core for such slow cores? At first I guessed that having lots of cores per processor would reduce the number of processors needed and, then, maybe for some software reduce licensing costs, but the IBM Power processors likely are going to be running Linux. So, the goal is to reduce licensing costs for Oracle? Something else? Or licensing costs has nothing to do with it? As I plan my server farm for my startup, what am I missing about the value of paying $4000+ for 18 relatively slow cores?
- yshalabi 11y ago
  These processors have a lot of advanced features for big-time computing users (warehouse scale, super computers, etc). You can't just look at frequency or cachesize or number of cores for this chip. There are reliability features, quality of service features, and overall capabilities that consumer grade processors don't have. Also I don't recommend you try to outfit your startups server farm. I dont know your needs, but you should find someone who can figure out what you really need.
  - graycat 11y ago
    Thanks! Initially all I "need" is a relatively high end of a consumer grade mid-tower case, e.g., an AMD 8 core processor, 32 GB of ECC main memory, several hard disks, on a current motherboard for less than $150 or so running Windows Server or maybe, initially, just Windows 7 Pro. Keep that on average half busy 24 x 7 for a month, and I will be able to afford more. If I get, say, two wire rack shelf units 18 x 48 x 72", fill them with a good router and mid tower cases, and keep all that on average half busy 24 x 7, then I will consider a colocation facility or the cloud. A few miles from me is a nicely big, fully serious colocation facility that offers dual 10 GbE Internet connections, etc. No joke: One of those shelf units has room for about 12 mid tower cases. Keep two such shelf units busy, and that will max out what I'm willing to pursue without a lot more server farm expertise than I have (or want to get) and also make cash not a problem. So, one hope is that I will be able to pay some experts, two or three days at a time, to hold my hand into more -- reliable electrical power, HVAC, floor space, cabling, racks, servers for the racks, internals of the servers for the racks, e.g., maybe Xeon, automation for software installation, system management, system monitoring, farm performance analysis, fail-over, virtual machine exploitation, security, test systems, development systems, organized code repository and testing, all relevant documentation, training, recruiting, HR, legal, real estate leasing, janitorial, physical security, etc. Or, right, just use a cloud! But for the high end Xeon processors, I'm looking ahead. E.g., a motherboard with two Xeons with 18 cores each, all in just one full tower case, or two for failover, or three considering testing, might provide enough computing for my startup all the way to exit so that I could avoid taking seriously what I'd have to do with 100 people and 50,000 square feet of server farm, dual optical fiber connections to an Internet backbone point of presence, etc. So, that's why looking into high end Xeons now is not totally wasted time. Thanks for the help!
mtanski 11y ago
The spark workflow is 10% cheaper (24.36 vs 21.88) over 3 years. Is that really worth having to support a non-mainstream architecture? I doubt it.
- RankingMember 11y ago
  That was my thought too. The "pain in the ass" factor associated with supporting a non-mainstream architecture is missing from the charts, and moves the dial away from IBM. That's not to say things couldn't change, but Xeons are proven, and unless you've got a surplus of money to throw at trying a new architecture (e.g. Google), you're better off sticking with the known good unless the predicted gains are sizable.
- vessenes 11y ago
  I just did this math for our company a couple months ago. Power8 memory bandwidth is VERY appealing. And, it's not always just about cost per benchmark unit -- if you have some realtime requirements for your analysis tools, then scale-up speed can be really valuable as compared to dev time and management time. In the end, we made the call for Intel because golang runs some key parts of our tools, and the golang power8 story isn't there. But, as I gaze at our servers where we paid what feels like thousands for extra megabytes of L3 cache, I wouldn't say I'm happy about the decision. A good go story from IBM would have likely tipped things the other way.
  - mtanski 11y ago
    I think you just kind of proved my point that real work load benchmarks would have to be much more attractive to offset the cost of supporting an architecture that's not tier one in many languages / software libraries / projects.
    - vessenes 11y ago
      Totally. That said, IBM isn't short on optimizing compiler folks. Open ecosystem support is a strategy to pick up small and mid-size buyers; it will be interesting to see if IBM gets there. I would look again next time we source hardware. And, if IBM put someone internally on a properly vectorized go compilation pathway for Power8, I would buy in a heartbeat, provided it ran some sort of debian variant.

73 points by baazaar 11y ago

Too late for the game. Power should do this way earlier. The Linux community was booming around PowerPC a few years back and now all the brains left to work on either ARM or x86. Without that community support(Power does not really run Windows), the chip is just a piece of cold hardware even though it can shine spotty in the spec. One of Power's biggest user is probably a licensee in China, who replaced its crypto logic and use it for their own needs, but that's far from enough to compete against Xeon.

teepo 11y ago
It's all about Linux. IBM's running Power8 with RedHat in SoftLayer data centers. Hadoop and jboss are some of the target workloads.
- bluedino 11y ago
  The ERP product we use has gone from an iSeries native product to a Linux version, it's so much faster it's not funny.
- ctstover 11y ago
  I remember the announcements back in May, but I still don't see an offering on their site. Can one really get a Linux instance on Power by the hour / month in SL? Even better in my case would be just a VPS, as a build node does need a monster server. At the same time, if they are "using it behind the scenes", yet not offering it to customers, that would be very bad for brand image. Isn't the crux of the selling points server consolidation? Which of course is the same exact thing "cloud provider". I still haven't tried it, but siteox.com has it though.
  - pm90 11y ago
    IBM is a enterprise behemoth. If you look at their sources of revenues, they focus a lot more on B2B with a few selected spinoffs designed to generate some public interest. Its not surprising they don't publicize a lot of things they do.
Shivetya 11y ago
Based on my work Power processors are simply the backbone of AIX and iSeries machines and perform very well in those applications. The interesting part is that either platform can move off the Power processor to another, the least impacted from a business perspective would be iSeries as the layer above the machine level is independent and would simply rebuild programs without customer intervention beyond upgrading the OS

alyandon 11y ago

So my question is - how much extra power does the IBM Power8 cpu need in order to get performance that is on par with Intel's Haswell?

kev009 11y ago
Look at the memory bandwidth numbers. These completely outclass the Xeon in certain types of workloads, apples to oranges.
- ksec 11y ago
  I thought after all these years and improvement Intel is invisible in performance. Turns out i was wrong. Although I would still buy Intel Chips for future prove. IBM is simply too incompetent to compete.
  - dorfsmay 11y ago
    Until about 5 years ago the Power architecture dominated in the CPU performance domain. Saying "IBM is too incompetetent" makes you sound like you don't really know this market.
    - Tinyyy 11y ago
      Hey, I wanna know more, can you elaborate?
      - wtallis 11y ago
        Intel's only got the ability to develop one microarchitecture family. When they try for more than one, things fall through the cracks and you get the Pentium 4 dead-end or the Atom's lackluster performance. Intel's primary microarchitecture is aimed at laptops. It scales reasonably down to large tablet power levels and up to workstation power levels. For the high-performance server market, they can only throw cores and cache at the problem, with some enterprise features bolted on. IBM's always targeted the high-performance server market. For a while, their Power cores were also being used for workstations and even a desktop by Apple, but that's never been the focus. They include things like decimal arithmetic and SMT and hardware transactional memory and they've been selling the high-end parts at 4-5GHz speeds for a long time.

groupmonoid 11y ago

By looking at the IBM-provided benchmarks, it looks like the new Power8 is better. But are there any independent benchmarks out there already?

TheCondor 11y ago
It probably doesn't matter, they aren't better enough. Now if IBM sold these maybe 30% cheaper, it could be a different story

eliben 11y ago

The almost $3K price tag on a "Linux OS" is disturbing

nabla9 11y ago
Why you find it disturbing that someone wants to pay for OS support?
- eliben 11y ago
  That's a lot for supporting a free OS on a single server
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - krylon 11y ago
    I think they assumed these servers would run RHEL, which is not cheap, especially on non-x86(_64) architectures.
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    It comes with an engineer's phone number.

jmnicolas 11y ago

My inner geek is longing for an affordable Power8 desktop machine ... do I NEED it ? Well ... you know ...

Quequau 11y ago
I hear you man! It's a shame that there's never been a reasonably priced ATX POWER mainboard available to individuals without a major service contract with IBM. Even that barebones dev server offer through OpenPower was over priced.

graycat 11y ago

Question: I looked up the price of an 18 core Xeon processor, with a clock speed under 3.0 GHz, and got $4000+. So, why be willing to pay so much per core for such slow cores? At first I guessed that having lots of cores per processor would reduce the number of processors needed and, then, maybe for some software reduce licensing costs, but the IBM Power processors likely are going to be running Linux. So, the goal is to reduce licensing costs for Oracle? Something else? Or licensing costs has nothing to do with it? As I plan my server farm for my startup, what am I missing about the value of paying $4000+ for 18 relatively slow cores?

yshalabi 11y ago
These processors have a lot of advanced features for big-time computing users (warehouse scale, super computers, etc). You can't just look at frequency or cachesize or number of cores for this chip. There are reliability features, quality of service features, and overall capabilities that consumer grade processors don't have. Also I don't recommend you try to outfit your startups server farm. I dont know your needs, but you should find someone who can figure out what you really need.
- graycat 11y ago
  Thanks! Initially all I "need" is a relatively high end of a consumer grade mid-tower case, e.g., an AMD 8 core processor, 32 GB of ECC main memory, several hard disks, on a current motherboard for less than $150 or so running Windows Server or maybe, initially, just Windows 7 Pro. Keep that on average half busy 24 x 7 for a month, and I will be able to afford more. If I get, say, two wire rack shelf units 18 x 48 x 72", fill them with a good router and mid tower cases, and keep all that on average half busy 24 x 7, then I will consider a colocation facility or the cloud. A few miles from me is a nicely big, fully serious colocation facility that offers dual 10 GbE Internet connections, etc. No joke: One of those shelf units has room for about 12 mid tower cases. Keep two such shelf units busy, and that will max out what I'm willing to pursue without a lot more server farm expertise than I have (or want to get) and also make cash not a problem. So, one hope is that I will be able to pay some experts, two or three days at a time, to hold my hand into more -- reliable electrical power, HVAC, floor space, cabling, racks, servers for the racks, internals of the servers for the racks, e.g., maybe Xeon, automation for software installation, system management, system monitoring, farm performance analysis, fail-over, virtual machine exploitation, security, test systems, development systems, organized code repository and testing, all relevant documentation, training, recruiting, HR, legal, real estate leasing, janitorial, physical security, etc. Or, right, just use a cloud! But for the high end Xeon processors, I'm looking ahead. E.g., a motherboard with two Xeons with 18 cores each, all in just one full tower case, or two for failover, or three considering testing, might provide enough computing for my startup all the way to exit so that I could avoid taking seriously what I'd have to do with 100 people and 50,000 square feet of server farm, dual optical fiber connections to an Internet backbone point of presence, etc. So, that's why looking into high end Xeons now is not totally wasted time. Thanks for the help!

mtanski 11y ago

The spark workflow is 10% cheaper (24.36 vs 21.88) over 3 years. Is that really worth having to support a non-mainstream architecture? I doubt it.

RankingMember 11y ago
That was my thought too. The "pain in the ass" factor associated with supporting a non-mainstream architecture is missing from the charts, and moves the dial away from IBM. That's not to say things couldn't change, but Xeons are proven, and unless you've got a surplus of money to throw at trying a new architecture (e.g. Google), you're better off sticking with the known good unless the predicted gains are sizable.
vessenes 11y ago
I just did this math for our company a couple months ago. Power8 memory bandwidth is VERY appealing. And, it's not always just about cost per benchmark unit -- if you have some realtime requirements for your analysis tools, then scale-up speed can be really valuable as compared to dev time and management time. In the end, we made the call for Intel because golang runs some key parts of our tools, and the golang power8 story isn't there. But, as I gaze at our servers where we paid what feels like thousands for extra megabytes of L3 cache, I wouldn't say I'm happy about the decision. A good go story from IBM would have likely tipped things the other way.
- mtanski 11y ago
  I think you just kind of proved my point that real work load benchmarks would have to be much more attractive to offset the cost of supporting an architecture that's not tier one in many languages / software libraries / projects.
  - vessenes 11y ago
    Totally. That said, IBM isn't short on optimizing compiler folks. Open ecosystem support is a strategy to pick up small and mid-size buyers; it will be interesting to see if IBM gets there. I would look again next time we source hardware. And, if IBM put someone internally on a properly vectorized go compilation pathway for Power8, I would buy in a heartbeat, provided it ran some sort of debian variant.