14 ms·

IBM’s 24-core Power9 chip

176 points by ajdlinux 10y ago

redtuesday 10y ago
I don't know why, but I always had a thing for Power CPU's. Really curious how Power9 compares to Power8 and Intel Broadwell-EP/EX when it comes to power efficiency (and of course performance wise).
- pavlov 10y ago
  I loved the PowerPC chips, the 604 and G5 in particular. Too bad it never became a viable platform outside of Apple. (In the '90s, the PowerPC had very competitive price/performance, but there wasn't a viable desktop OS available after Apple terminated the original MacOS clone program. 5-10 years later Linux would have been much more ready, but the chips were not competitive with Intel anymore.)
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I can't help wonder if Intel "won" by bruteforcing the lithography side. But this then made them "blind" to the reduced cost side of Moore's Law (or they tried for the longest time to get people to ignore it). Their first reminder was perhaps netbooks, using semi-retired Celerons to make small and cheap clamshell web browsers and media players. Their second, and ongoing, reminder is smartphones/tablets.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    PowerPC essentially died as a desktop and server processor once Apple decided to go Intel. IBM decided to go back towards Power's roots with the POWER5 (the follow-on to the PPC970 in the Power Mac G5 and the PowerPC-based XServes).
    - pavlov 10y ago
      PowerPC really died in 1997-98 when it became clear that Jobs wasn't going to license Mac OS (classic or X) for 3rd party PowerPC boxes anymore, and Windows NT on PPC wasn't going anywhere. Without an operating system, IBM and Motorola didn't have an incentive to build PC chips anymore. The G4 happened because it was already in development and the vector extensions were useful for Motorola's embedded ambitions. The G5 happened because Apple basically paid IBM to make a desktop chip out of their POWER designs, AFAIK. Around 2004, there was a startup PowerPC maker called P.A. Semi [1] that apparently competed for Apple's Mac CPU business. After Apple went Intel, they acquired P.A. Semi to design iPhone chips instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
  - kev009 10y ago
    For large swaths of life the PowerPCs in a mac significantly faster than any available x86 CPUs. Back in the single core days, clock speed was something that lay user vaguely understood was correlated to performance. This had a subtle but real impact as Intel and OEMs were effective in marketing clock speed number as something users should care about. It was very effective until it backfired when AMD torpedoed intel with Opteron, and then clock frequency scaling became undesirable.
    - StillBored 10y ago
      The idea that PPC was faster than x86 back in the PPC mac days is Apple hyperbole. There were a few occasions where the fastest PPC was faster than the fastest x86 available but they were far and few between and very slim. If all you looked at were the very carefully selected/tuned apple benchmarks you can be forgiven for thinking that (the photoshop filter benchmark using altivec comes to mind) there was a huge PPC advantage. Here is a random google search for spec performance over time of assorted CPU arches. http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance/ http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-... The only obvious case in that graph where PPC>x86 is in mid 1995. I can't find the one I saw a couple years ago detailing the core/clockrate comparisons of PPC's shipped in Macs with common PCs, that was much easier to read and far more obvious.
      - Synaesthesia 10y ago
        It wasn't just Apple hyperbole, PowerPC really did beat Intel at quite a few instances, and generally kept up until about 2004. AltiVec with photoshop was not just a tuned benchmark but a significant advantage on a common scenario. The Power chips also consumed significantly less power, enabling Apple to put far more powerful CPU's in laptops.
  - MeetTheCryo 10y ago
    (It always confused me that my PowerPC 603 @ 75 MHz (a Performa 6200) was so, so much slower than my PowerPC 601 @ 80 MHz (a Power Macintosh 8100) – it wasn't until years later that I learned that the '601 was executing three instructions per Hz whilst the '603 was only executing two instructions per Hz...)
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    They still live on in the embedded scene, esp aerospace. Freescale makes them. They steadily improve in all kinds of ways. Example: http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/power-architecture-processors/qoriq-processors-power-architecture-t-series:QORIQ-POWER-ARCHITECTURE http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/... They're also deployed on FPGA's as embedded CPU's.
- creshal 10y ago
  Power CPUs are also the only currently on the market that work with open source firmware from the ground up – everything else needs proprietary microcode and/or firmware blobs.
  - mikehollinger 10y ago
    If you're curious where that lives, check out the OpenPower Github project.[1] (full disclosure - I worked on tiny pieces of the code and stuff adjacent to it in the design) [1] https://github.com/open-power https://github.com/open-power
  - redtuesday 10y ago
    Yeah, or possibly j-core j2 [0] if you fab the chips yourself and don't need much power. [0] http://j-core.org/ http://j-core.org/
    - creshal 10y ago
      No offence, but the POWER is the only free CPU on the market that isn't a hippie piece of crap.
      - aseipp 10y ago
        "No offense intended. Now please, allow that to completely excuse me as I offer a direct insult."
        creshal 10y ago
        No, really. I get it, building your own CPU is fun. But they're all useless for the debate at hand, because nobody wants obsolete, slow, power hungry CPUs just because they're free.
        redtuesday 10y ago
        at least one company want's this cpu [1], (but since one of the reimplementors of the superH architecture, or whatever you want to call them, works there - as CEO in fact - , take it with a huge grain of salt). since you seem to know about the power consumption, can you please share some numbers about the power consumption of the jcore cpu (on a comparable process to other cpu's build for IoT devices, usb controllers etc)? jcore is not intended to be a replacement for the main cpu, so this would be really interesting to me, and would save me from asking on the mailing list. ;P [1] http://se-instruments.com/press_releases/sei-adopts-open-source-microprocessor-to-accelerate-the-industrial-iot-ecosystem/ http://se-instruments.com/press_releases/sei-adopts-open-sou...
- swills 10y ago
  Indeed, performance per watt is the real question. They almost caught up with Intel with the Power8. If they manage to beat Intel with Power9, I think that would make a lot of folks take notice.
rwmj 10y ago
Now if only they'd make development boards available for less ~$4000.
- chx 10y ago
  The Wii and the Wii U is your friend.
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    As much as I think the Wii, the Wii U and the Xbox 360 are all the equal-best gaming consoles ever (yes, I judge my gaming consoles purely by their CPU architecture), each of those consoles uses a custom chip developed under a specific IBM-{Nintendo, Microsoft} agreement, so they're somewhat different chips from the POWER[n] series :)
    - chx 10y ago
      The Wii and Wii U are using PowerPC CPUs.
      - kbenson 10y ago
        Yes. The distinction being made here is that PowerPC is not necessarily the same as Power, even if they have a shared lineage.
        ajdlinux 10y ago
        More importantly, the system architecture is different.
renox 10y ago
The article say Power9 chip will have "hardware assisted garbage collection" and that's all, that's a bit short for such an important topic.. Does anyone have more information about it?
- brixon 10y ago
  The new SPARCs have something like that too. http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-servers-next-cpu-the-sparc-m7 http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-se...
  - wepple 10y ago
    > Other silicon accelerators include a SQL coprocessor in each core. Entire SELECT statements now run at silicon speeds. seriously? love to see how/why that was put in the die
    - valarauca1 10y ago
      Oracle did this in the past 2 generations of their UltraSPARC architecture. At it's core a `SELECT FROM` statement is a filter lambda (without any joins, or before/after a join has been done depending on query optimization). Fundamentally this is because an SQL table is a flat array. With row's being flat array's within the table's memory space. Calculating the pointer to fields within rows within a table is ridiculously parallel. You're limited only by SIMD size. (this is 1 FMA + 1 add against a constant ~2 ticks). Also custom wide SIMD registers can allow for `VARCHAR(255)` equality statements to be done in 1 processor cycle.
      - kbenson 10y ago
        I guess I shouldn't be surprised that when a database company swallows a CPU hardware division that the CPU might sprout some more database specific operations, but I was. I would love to see some benchmarks of how much this speeds up some sample workload queries, if you happen to know of some (preferably not from Oracle's marketing dept.)?
mtgx 10y ago
Between Power9, AMD's Zen-based Naples, and Qualcomm's ARM-based Centriq, things are looking pretty interesting for the future of servers.
- wyldfire 10y ago
  IMO Xeon will be tough to unseat for performance. But a lot of server consumers only want to be able to scale ever-more guest OS/containers on a single platform, so these challengers do pose a real threat to Intel's server market. Open source software has been a powerful economic force: the fact that so much software exists that's designed to target many similar platforms and is frequently recompiled for those targets means that the impact to the end-consumer of switching among x86/ppc/arm is much lower than it was in the past.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    I don't know if they have to beat Intel on performance per core. There are markets that require the best performance per core, but there is also a big market that wants more reasonably powerful cores for a given price point. For instance, in the VPS hosting market, you see most providers offer "vCPUs" (virtual CPUs), because then they can sell their customers "four cores" (or 20 cores) on the cheap, and so on. It's a good marketing strategy. What if they can offer real cores for the same low price? That would be pretty appealing to their customers. They can also offer "24-core dedicated servers" on the cheap, and so on. Also, in the long run, it would be best for hosting and cloud providers if they would at least adopt a strategy of 50% Intel chips, and 50% AMD + Power + ARM. That should get them much better prices in the future (from all the chip providers), if they did that. Monopolies don't serve anyone but the monopolist.
    - rwmj 10y ago
      They could look at the Cavium (ARM 64 bit) chips. 48 cores / socket, and typically two sockets per server. Each core is in-order and rather slow. eg: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#ov http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#...
Unklejoe 10y ago
I'm not too familiar with the PowerPC world, so maybe someone could help me out. I know I should just search, but I'm feeling lazy. Is this a new ISA or just the latest revision in their existing ISA? Also, what's the relationship with Freescale (NXP) here, who sells pretty decent "PowerPC" chips for server-ish platforms, such as the T2080. Do they license the ISA from IBM sort of like how ARM works?
- creshal 10y ago
  POWER and PowerPC are two somewhat related, but independent ISAs. Both are available for licensing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation This is going to be the latest refinement of the POWER ISA, replacing the current POWER8 used by IBM, and licensed by some Chinese company for not yet released products. FreeScale/NXP are licensing PowerPC.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  It's a new revision of an existing ISA. POWER8 implements Power ISA 2.07, POWER8 is 3.0. The Freescale part of NXP was formed out of Motorola's semiconductor division - Motorola, in turn, was part of the original AIM Alliance with Apple and IBM back in the early 90s that developed PowerPC. So they've been making PowerPC stuff since the very beginning. I would assume they have a license of some sort from IBM. [Disclaimer: IBMer, opinions my own]
  - jjtheblunt 10y ago
    typo on the second POWER8 ?
    - ajdlinux 10y ago
      Argh, yes, I meant POWER9. Thanks.
- rwmj 10y ago
  Note the FreeScale chips implement the embedded variant of POWER7 ("book E" IIRC). They won't run server software. In particular vector instructions are missing -- servers OSes like RHEL will crash very early in boot. And last I looked little endian support was missing or broken. Big endian is basically dead on modern server POWER although at Red Hat we still build both endians for now.
theandrewbailey 10y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that Power9 die shot looks pretty? Reminds me of a stained glass window. http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-hot-chips-power9-die.jpg http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-h...
- chiph 10y ago
  Intel used to publish poster-sized photos of their dies. I had one for the Pentium-II. It'd be cool to get one of this.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    As somebody who's a hardware enthusiast I wish I could buy poster sized dye shots still :\
  - rwmj 10y ago
    I had the 386 one in my dorm room at university. Edit: This one, I think: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Intel_80386_IV_die.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Intel_80... It's nice that you can almost see individual wires.
    - Meegul 10y ago
      Wow, that really is quite beautiful. People often don't realize the marvels of technology involved in uploading their selfies.
  - mtanski 10y ago
    I still use this one: http://www.cpucollection.se/data/media/107/keychain_intel_pentium_die.jpg http://www.cpucollection.se/data/media/107/keychain_intel_pe... as my keychain. It's an early 90s Pentium (60 or 66). My dad got it while working at the university and at some point in time in high school gave it to me. The Lucite is pretty scratched up by now, but it has a weird sentimental value to me so I'm planning on getting it buffed out.
- 10y ago
crudbug 10y ago
Interesting, IBM wants to become ARM of server computing - "Open to IP changes"
IgorPartola 10y ago
So realistically, does processor architecture matter today from the custkmer's point of view? I mean performance and all that matters, but presumably that will be offset by market forces. But for example I rent a couple of ARM servers from Scaleway as well as a whole bunch of x86-64 servers from various providers, and they all can do all the same stuff. So why is it that x86 is the chip data centers prefer when they could have a variety of chips and let the customers and the market choose?
- duaneb 10y ago
  On the data center side, it is quite difficult finding decent server hardware with eg ecc for arm.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  All the scale is on x86, so it gets the best fabs and the cheapest unitary costs. ARM got some scale with mobile, so they are starting to compete. But until Moore's Law is really buried and forgotten, new architectures won't be able to compete on already filled niches.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    Erm, ARM partners ship 30x as many cores every year as Intel[1]. ARM is the one with scale. The actual difference is Intel has proprietary fab technology one or two generations ahead of TSMC etc. [1] The actual numbers for 2014 are: Intel shipped 400 million chips, ARM partners shipped 12 billion chips.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      I think the "scale" being discussed is semiconductor manufacturing, where the area matters and the unit count does not. Each of Intel's CPUs is between 100x and 10x larger than each of those ARM chips. For example a Xeon E5 has a die area of > 450mm^2, the Apple A9 is about 100mm^2, a Tegra 2 is ~50mm^2, and a Cortex is < 5mm^2. Those unit counts you mention are dominated by those smaller parts.
apaprocki 10y ago
ISA 3.0 adds a new instruction 'darn' -- Deliver a Random Number. That's a pretty good asm mnemonic :) I wonder if anyone has dug into the details of how that works yet?
- dogma1138 10y ago
  https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
- planteen 10y ago
  Wow that's pretty good. My other favorite mnemonic is also from PowerPC 'eieio' - enforce in-order execution of I/O.
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    "IBM has a well-known disdain for vowels, and basically refuses to use them for mnemonics (they were called on this, and did "eieio" as an instruction just to try to make up for it)." - Linus Torvalds, 2009 (http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/coding_style.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/coding_style.html)
    - planteen 10y ago
      Haha, didn't know that. I figured an engineer had a kid with an affinity for Old MacDonald.
      - aruggirello 10y ago
        Old MacDonald had a (server) farm, eieio...
  - CountHackulus 10y ago
    The thing I love about the eieio instruction is that it serves the same purpose on-chip as in the song. Sort of a sync point.
jalfresi 10y ago
I'm quite naive regarding Power processors; does anyone know where I can see any motherboards with prices for power processors, or even if any of the BSDs run on them? It seems like it would be quite a nice platform/OS combination that side-steps the traditional Apple/OSX vs Intel/Linux workstation options
- aninteger 10y ago
  OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD all have support for the older Apple G4 and G5 hardware. Obviously being older they are kind of slow (especially compared to amd64) but if you just use them as file servers they are fine. The biggest problem with BSD on PowerPC, in my opinion, is the lack of modern programming languages. I believe on BSD you are stuck with C, C++, ruby, python, and perl mostly. No node, no Java, no golang, no rust. If you use Debian you have access to Java.
  - rufius 10y ago
    Keep in mind Power != PowerPC. Related families but there are differences (exercise left to the reader).
  - binarycrusader 10y ago
    While Go doesn't have a port to BSD on POWER, there is a Go port for POWER on Linux (it's the s390x port). I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult (relatively speaking) to do the port as a result.
    - StillBored 10y ago
      s390!=POWER The GOARCH for power is ppc64/ppc64le AFAIK. (s390x is the mainframe processor, aka z/Architecture, the latest being the z13 which is most definitely not a power8/9.)
      - binarycrusader 10y ago
        I had thought s390x could be based on POWER8/9, but you're right, that doesn't appear to be the case. I apologise. Regardless, Go does consider S390x to be a separate port.
walki 10y ago
When POWER8 came out in 2014 I ran a couple of numerical benchmarks against Intel Xeon CPUs. In my benchmarks the POWER8 CPUs where slightly faster than Intel Xeon CPUs when the data fitted into the CPU's cache, so far so good (the speed advantage of the POWER8 CPU can easily be explained by the much higher clocking). But once I started running heavy benchmarks involving gigabytes of data the POWER8 CPUs where at least twice as slow. Now 3 years later POWER9 CPUs will come out that are about 1.5 times faster, in my opinion this is not enough to compete against Intel. Why would anybody want to get locked into a rare and more expensive CPU architecture if there is no speed advantage?
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  Uptime. Reliability. Support. Feature set. Backwards compatibility.
- rwmj 10y ago
  You might have issues with the quality of your compiler or you might be using POWER7 code and/or have VSX disabled. IME POWER8 is somewhat faster than high end Xeons (although not in terms of price/performance).
  - walki 10y ago
    I compiled my code using the latest GCC version available, I even made sure I used the right compiler flags to enable e.g. hardware POPCNT support. I know that IBM claimed that POWER8 CPUs were faster than Intel Xeon CPUs but I found the opposite to be true (at least for the benchmarks I cared about). You can also find many other benchmarks on the web which are in favor of Intel Xeon CPUs compared to POWER8. I am not against IBM POWER CPUs, I was just disappointed by POWER8...
    - rwmj 10y ago
      Fair enough. I'm sure it's workload dependent, and also I have not tested huge data sets. I'm most interested in the overhead of virtualization and (separately) compile times.
reacharavindh 10y ago
Why wouldn't IBM just have a simple product page for such an innovation? Like an Apple.com/iphone page for Power systems :-) Search for Power9 on IBM.com yields practically nothing. http://www.ibm.com/search/esas/search?q=power9&v=17&sn=23&us=utf&lang=en&cc=us&Search=Search#v%3D%2B1%26q%3Dpower9 http://www.ibm.com/search/esas/search?q=power9&v=17&sn=23&us... Perhaps the website is all maintained by the folks busy in "the cloud".
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  Because this is just a technical preannouncement, you can't actually buy anything yet? A search for POWER8 returns lots of hits.
  - reacharavindh 10y ago
    Agreed. I wasn't looking for a buy button. However, an authoritative info page by IBM itself providing technical specs and details of the platform would earn them good credits at least amongst the tech audience.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    Also likely because it's not targeted at consumers in the same way. Intel doesn't release products like hat. Dell and Apple do for their products that integrate Intel chips though.
kbenson 10y ago
So, this is the chip that Google, Facebook and Rackspace used in their design for the open compute platform[1][2]. Maybe the entry level price will drop when like those are buying them (or their components) at scale. 1: http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-rackspace-power9-system/ http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-... 2: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-chips-hit-the-big-time-at-google.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-chips-hit-...
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Don't forget the Raptor Workstation. Allegedly, they plan to sell the thing for less than what SGI and Sun sold their boxes in the past. Using POWER8-9 chips in a market where ebay's best deal is $4,000 for a POWER8 CPU. ;)
crudbug 10y ago
24-core seems odd here, 32-core will be a more symmetric design ? What is main reason for this ? Cost ?
- jeff_marshall 10y ago
  Symmetric doesn't mean 'power of two'. Quite a few ICs have had even numbers of cores on them (I'm not aware of any with an odd number of cores, but that doesn't seem like the end of the world either). Lots of other things have to fit on the die, too (e.g. unified cache, which takes up a lot of real estate in chips that have them)
- pdq 10y ago
  I have no direct knowledge on IBM's processor, but from working on other processors, usually it's due to product yield. Today's cutting edge fabrication of multi-core chips makes it quite unlikely to get many dies to manufacture where all the CPU's are working at high speeds. Chips must run at a single frequency, so the slowest frequency is the bottleneck. If you fabricated 32 cores, and 1 fails testing, the chip is garbage. So the strategy is that the chips are fabricated with 32 cores, and then they speed-test the cores and take fastest 24 cores. The remaining 8 are fuse-disabled, and the end user sees a 24 core chip. Note this strategy also allows them to produce a 16-core chip with the same die, if for example only 20 cores work at high speeds. So you get both high yield and high speed chips.
  - AlbertoGP 10y ago
    Yes, that's done some times but in this case, from the die picture posted here in another thread [1], it seems to have indeed 24 cores in 12 pairs (each of the "houses"). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351729 http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-hot-chips-power9-die.jpg http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-h...
- shermanyo 10y ago
  slightly off topic, but for some reason your comment made me remember the time I had to do some regression testing of a fix backported to a really old version of our software. We had to test against the OSs we'd since dropped support for, which included HP-UX, AIX and s390. The first time I heard someone mention a "31bit" build, I thought they were taking the piss :P It just seemed so odd at the time...
EdSharkey 10y ago
Do these IBM systems have anything like Intel ME that might be used by Big Bro for remote, covert rooting or subversion of the server? If yes on the standard model, can we order a version of these systems that lack that feature? I'd love to see some market forces nudging Intel to offer CPU's and Motherboards without ME.
- mvdwoord 10y ago
  Check out: http://openpowerfoundation.org http://openpowerfoundation.org and: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php Supposedly this could be a way out of Intel ME. Gotta see it first though, but I have one pre-ordered (whatever that means).
gpderetta 10y ago
So, is the 24 cores 4 threads variant just the same as the 12 cores 8 thread variants but with each (ridiculously) wide core statically partitioned in two? edit: should have read till the end.
ignasl 10y ago
I don't understand why IBM is not creating their own cloud services like Amazon, MS or Google. They have talent, they make their own hardware and software they are struggling a little bit with this new software landscape so why not just do it?
- RandomBK 10y ago
  Well, there's BlueMix, but it's a shameful shadow of what Amazon/Google/MS are offering.
- velox_io 10y ago
  They acquired Softlayer, and they're pushing BlueMix and Watson pretty hard - so they definitely have a footing in the cloud hosting/ services!

176 points by ajdlinux 10y ago

I don't know why, but I always had a thing for Power CPU's. Really curious how Power9 compares to Power8 and Intel Broadwell-EP/EX when it comes to power efficiency (and of course performance wise).

pavlov 10y ago
I loved the PowerPC chips, the 604 and G5 in particular. Too bad it never became a viable platform outside of Apple. (In the '90s, the PowerPC had very competitive price/performance, but there wasn't a viable desktop OS available after Apple terminated the original MacOS clone program. 5-10 years later Linux would have been much more ready, but the chips were not competitive with Intel anymore.)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I can't help wonder if Intel "won" by bruteforcing the lithography side. But this then made them "blind" to the reduced cost side of Moore's Law (or they tried for the longest time to get people to ignore it). Their first reminder was perhaps netbooks, using semi-retired Celerons to make small and cheap clamshell web browsers and media players. Their second, and ongoing, reminder is smartphones/tablets.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  PowerPC essentially died as a desktop and server processor once Apple decided to go Intel. IBM decided to go back towards Power's roots with the POWER5 (the follow-on to the PPC970 in the Power Mac G5 and the PowerPC-based XServes).
  - pavlov 10y ago
    PowerPC really died in 1997-98 when it became clear that Jobs wasn't going to license Mac OS (classic or X) for 3rd party PowerPC boxes anymore, and Windows NT on PPC wasn't going anywhere. Without an operating system, IBM and Motorola didn't have an incentive to build PC chips anymore. The G4 happened because it was already in development and the vector extensions were useful for Motorola's embedded ambitions. The G5 happened because Apple basically paid IBM to make a desktop chip out of their POWER designs, AFAIK. Around 2004, there was a startup PowerPC maker called P.A. Semi [1] that apparently competed for Apple's Mac CPU business. After Apple went Intel, they acquired P.A. Semi to design iPhone chips instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
- kev009 10y ago
  For large swaths of life the PowerPCs in a mac significantly faster than any available x86 CPUs. Back in the single core days, clock speed was something that lay user vaguely understood was correlated to performance. This had a subtle but real impact as Intel and OEMs were effective in marketing clock speed number as something users should care about. It was very effective until it backfired when AMD torpedoed intel with Opteron, and then clock frequency scaling became undesirable.
  - StillBored 10y ago
    The idea that PPC was faster than x86 back in the PPC mac days is Apple hyperbole. There were a few occasions where the fastest PPC was faster than the fastest x86 available but they were far and few between and very slim. If all you looked at were the very carefully selected/tuned apple benchmarks you can be forgiven for thinking that (the photoshop filter benchmark using altivec comes to mind) there was a huge PPC advantage. Here is a random google search for spec performance over time of assorted CPU arches. http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance/ http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-... The only obvious case in that graph where PPC>x86 is in mid 1995. I can't find the one I saw a couple years ago detailing the core/clockrate comparisons of PPC's shipped in Macs with common PCs, that was much easier to read and far more obvious.
    - Synaesthesia 10y ago
      It wasn't just Apple hyperbole, PowerPC really did beat Intel at quite a few instances, and generally kept up until about 2004. AltiVec with photoshop was not just a tuned benchmark but a significant advantage on a common scenario. The Power chips also consumed significantly less power, enabling Apple to put far more powerful CPU's in laptops.
- MeetTheCryo 10y ago
  (It always confused me that my PowerPC 603 @ 75 MHz (a Performa 6200) was so, so much slower than my PowerPC 601 @ 80 MHz (a Power Macintosh 8100) – it wasn't until years later that I learned that the '601 was executing three instructions per Hz whilst the '603 was only executing two instructions per Hz...)
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  They still live on in the embedded scene, esp aerospace. Freescale makes them. They steadily improve in all kinds of ways. Example: http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/power-architecture-processors/qoriq-processors-power-architecture-t-series:QORIQ-POWER-ARCHITECTURE http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/... They're also deployed on FPGA's as embedded CPU's.
creshal 10y ago
Power CPUs are also the only currently on the market that work with open source firmware from the ground up – everything else needs proprietary microcode and/or firmware blobs.
- mikehollinger 10y ago
  If you're curious where that lives, check out the OpenPower Github project.[1] (full disclosure - I worked on tiny pieces of the code and stuff adjacent to it in the design) [1] https://github.com/open-power https://github.com/open-power
- redtuesday 10y ago
  Yeah, or possibly j-core j2 [0] if you fab the chips yourself and don't need much power. [0] http://j-core.org/ http://j-core.org/
  - creshal 10y ago
    No offence, but the POWER is the only free CPU on the market that isn't a hippie piece of crap.
    - aseipp 10y ago
      "No offense intended. Now please, allow that to completely excuse me as I offer a direct insult."
      - creshal 10y ago
        No, really. I get it, building your own CPU is fun. But they're all useless for the debate at hand, because nobody wants obsolete, slow, power hungry CPUs just because they're free.
        redtuesday 10y ago
        at least one company want's this cpu [1], (but since one of the reimplementors of the superH architecture, or whatever you want to call them, works there - as CEO in fact - , take it with a huge grain of salt). since you seem to know about the power consumption, can you please share some numbers about the power consumption of the jcore cpu (on a comparable process to other cpu's build for IoT devices, usb controllers etc)? jcore is not intended to be a replacement for the main cpu, so this would be really interesting to me, and would save me from asking on the mailing list. ;P [1] http://se-instruments.com/press_releases/sei-adopts-open-source-microprocessor-to-accelerate-the-industrial-iot-ecosystem/ http://se-instruments.com/press_releases/sei-adopts-open-sou...
swills 10y ago
Indeed, performance per watt is the real question. They almost caught up with Intel with the Power8. If they manage to beat Intel with Power9, I think that would make a lot of folks take notice.

rwmj 10y ago

Now if only they'd make development boards available for less ~$4000.

chx 10y ago
The Wii and the Wii U is your friend.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  As much as I think the Wii, the Wii U and the Xbox 360 are all the equal-best gaming consoles ever (yes, I judge my gaming consoles purely by their CPU architecture), each of those consoles uses a custom chip developed under a specific IBM-{Nintendo, Microsoft} agreement, so they're somewhat different chips from the POWER[n] series :)
  - chx 10y ago
    The Wii and Wii U are using PowerPC CPUs.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      Yes. The distinction being made here is that PowerPC is not necessarily the same as Power, even if they have a shared lineage.
      - ajdlinux 10y ago
        More importantly, the system architecture is different.

renox 10y ago

The article say Power9 chip will have "hardware assisted garbage collection" and that's all, that's a bit short for such an important topic.. Does anyone have more information about it?

brixon 10y ago
The new SPARCs have something like that too. http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-servers-next-cpu-the-sparc-m7 http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-se...
- wepple 10y ago
  > Other silicon accelerators include a SQL coprocessor in each core. Entire SELECT statements now run at silicon speeds. seriously? love to see how/why that was put in the die
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    Oracle did this in the past 2 generations of their UltraSPARC architecture. At it's core a `SELECT FROM` statement is a filter lambda (without any joins, or before/after a join has been done depending on query optimization). Fundamentally this is because an SQL table is a flat array. With row's being flat array's within the table's memory space. Calculating the pointer to fields within rows within a table is ridiculously parallel. You're limited only by SIMD size. (this is 1 FMA + 1 add against a constant ~2 ticks). Also custom wide SIMD registers can allow for `VARCHAR(255)` equality statements to be done in 1 processor cycle.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      I guess I shouldn't be surprised that when a database company swallows a CPU hardware division that the CPU might sprout some more database specific operations, but I was. I would love to see some benchmarks of how much this speeds up some sample workload queries, if you happen to know of some (preferably not from Oracle's marketing dept.)?

mtgx 10y ago

Between Power9, AMD's Zen-based Naples, and Qualcomm's ARM-based Centriq, things are looking pretty interesting for the future of servers.

wyldfire 10y ago
IMO Xeon will be tough to unseat for performance. But a lot of server consumers only want to be able to scale ever-more guest OS/containers on a single platform, so these challengers do pose a real threat to Intel's server market. Open source software has been a powerful economic force: the fact that so much software exists that's designed to target many similar platforms and is frequently recompiled for those targets means that the impact to the end-consumer of switching among x86/ppc/arm is much lower than it was in the past.
- mtgx 10y ago
  I don't know if they have to beat Intel on performance per core. There are markets that require the best performance per core, but there is also a big market that wants more reasonably powerful cores for a given price point. For instance, in the VPS hosting market, you see most providers offer "vCPUs" (virtual CPUs), because then they can sell their customers "four cores" (or 20 cores) on the cheap, and so on. It's a good marketing strategy. What if they can offer real cores for the same low price? That would be pretty appealing to their customers. They can also offer "24-core dedicated servers" on the cheap, and so on. Also, in the long run, it would be best for hosting and cloud providers if they would at least adopt a strategy of 50% Intel chips, and 50% AMD + Power + ARM. That should get them much better prices in the future (from all the chip providers), if they did that. Monopolies don't serve anyone but the monopolist.
  - rwmj 10y ago
    They could look at the Cavium (ARM 64 bit) chips. 48 cores / socket, and typically two sockets per server. Each core is in-order and rather slow. eg: http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#ov http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5460#...

Unklejoe 10y ago

I'm not too familiar with the PowerPC world, so maybe someone could help me out. I know I should just search, but I'm feeling lazy. Is this a new ISA or just the latest revision in their existing ISA? Also, what's the relationship with Freescale (NXP) here, who sells pretty decent "PowerPC" chips for server-ish platforms, such as the T2080. Do they license the ISA from IBM sort of like how ARM works?

creshal 10y ago
POWER and PowerPC are two somewhat related, but independent ISAs. Both are available for licensing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation This is going to be the latest refinement of the POWER ISA, replacing the current POWER8 used by IBM, and licensed by some Chinese company for not yet released products. FreeScale/NXP are licensing PowerPC.
ajdlinux 10y ago
It's a new revision of an existing ISA. POWER8 implements Power ISA 2.07, POWER8 is 3.0. The Freescale part of NXP was formed out of Motorola's semiconductor division - Motorola, in turn, was part of the original AIM Alliance with Apple and IBM back in the early 90s that developed PowerPC. So they've been making PowerPC stuff since the very beginning. I would assume they have a license of some sort from IBM. [Disclaimer: IBMer, opinions my own]
- jjtheblunt 10y ago
  typo on the second POWER8 ?
  - ajdlinux 10y ago
    Argh, yes, I meant POWER9. Thanks.
rwmj 10y ago
Note the FreeScale chips implement the embedded variant of POWER7 ("book E" IIRC). They won't run server software. In particular vector instructions are missing -- servers OSes like RHEL will crash very early in boot. And last I looked little endian support was missing or broken. Big endian is basically dead on modern server POWER although at Red Hat we still build both endians for now.

theandrewbailey 10y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that Power9 die shot looks pretty? Reminds me of a stained glass window. http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-hot-chips-power9-die.jpg http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-h...

chiph 10y ago
Intel used to publish poster-sized photos of their dies. I had one for the Pentium-II. It'd be cool to get one of this.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  As somebody who's a hardware enthusiast I wish I could buy poster sized dye shots still :\
- rwmj 10y ago
  I had the 386 one in my dorm room at university. Edit: This one, I think: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Intel_80386_IV_die.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Intel_80... It's nice that you can almost see individual wires.
  - Meegul 10y ago
    Wow, that really is quite beautiful. People often don't realize the marvels of technology involved in uploading their selfies.
- mtanski 10y ago
  I still use this one: http://www.cpucollection.se/data/media/107/keychain_intel_pentium_die.jpg http://www.cpucollection.se/data/media/107/keychain_intel_pe... as my keychain. It's an early 90s Pentium (60 or 66). My dad got it while working at the university and at some point in time in high school gave it to me. The Lucite is pretty scratched up by now, but it has a weird sentimental value to me so I'm planning on getting it buffed out.
10y ago

crudbug 10y ago

Interesting, IBM wants to become ARM of server computing - "Open to IP changes"

IgorPartola 10y ago

So realistically, does processor architecture matter today from the custkmer's point of view? I mean performance and all that matters, but presumably that will be offset by market forces. But for example I rent a couple of ARM servers from Scaleway as well as a whole bunch of x86-64 servers from various providers, and they all can do all the same stuff. So why is it that x86 is the chip data centers prefer when they could have a variety of chips and let the customers and the market choose?

duaneb 10y ago
On the data center side, it is quite difficult finding decent server hardware with eg ecc for arm.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
marcosdumay 10y ago
All the scale is on x86, so it gets the best fabs and the cheapest unitary costs. ARM got some scale with mobile, so they are starting to compete. But until Moore's Law is really buried and forgotten, new architectures won't be able to compete on already filled niches.
- rwmj 10y ago
  Erm, ARM partners ship 30x as many cores every year as Intel[1]. ARM is the one with scale. The actual difference is Intel has proprietary fab technology one or two generations ahead of TSMC etc. [1] The actual numbers for 2014 are: Intel shipped 400 million chips, ARM partners shipped 12 billion chips.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    I think the "scale" being discussed is semiconductor manufacturing, where the area matters and the unit count does not. Each of Intel's CPUs is between 100x and 10x larger than each of those ARM chips. For example a Xeon E5 has a die area of > 450mm^2, the Apple A9 is about 100mm^2, a Tegra 2 is ~50mm^2, and a Cortex is < 5mm^2. Those unit counts you mention are dominated by those smaller parts.

apaprocki 10y ago

ISA 3.0 adds a new instruction 'darn' -- Deliver a Random Number. That's a pretty good asm mnemonic :) I wonder if anyone has dug into the details of how that works yet?

dogma1138 10y ago
https://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
planteen 10y ago
Wow that's pretty good. My other favorite mnemonic is also from PowerPC 'eieio' - enforce in-order execution of I/O.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  "IBM has a well-known disdain for vowels, and basically refuses to use them for mnemonics (they were called on this, and did "eieio" as an instruction just to try to make up for it)." - Linus Torvalds, 2009 (http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/coding_style.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/coding_style.html)
  - planteen 10y ago
    Haha, didn't know that. I figured an engineer had a kid with an affinity for Old MacDonald.
    - aruggirello 10y ago
      Old MacDonald had a (server) farm, eieio...
- CountHackulus 10y ago
  The thing I love about the eieio instruction is that it serves the same purpose on-chip as in the song. Sort of a sync point.

jalfresi 10y ago

I'm quite naive regarding Power processors; does anyone know where I can see any motherboards with prices for power processors, or even if any of the BSDs run on them? It seems like it would be quite a nice platform/OS combination that side-steps the traditional Apple/OSX vs Intel/Linux workstation options

aninteger 10y ago
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD all have support for the older Apple G4 and G5 hardware. Obviously being older they are kind of slow (especially compared to amd64) but if you just use them as file servers they are fine. The biggest problem with BSD on PowerPC, in my opinion, is the lack of modern programming languages. I believe on BSD you are stuck with C, C++, ruby, python, and perl mostly. No node, no Java, no golang, no rust. If you use Debian you have access to Java.
- rufius 10y ago
  Keep in mind Power != PowerPC. Related families but there are differences (exercise left to the reader).
- binarycrusader 10y ago
  While Go doesn't have a port to BSD on POWER, there is a Go port for POWER on Linux (it's the s390x port). I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult (relatively speaking) to do the port as a result.
  - StillBored 10y ago
    s390!=POWER The GOARCH for power is ppc64/ppc64le AFAIK. (s390x is the mainframe processor, aka z/Architecture, the latest being the z13 which is most definitely not a power8/9.)
    - binarycrusader 10y ago
      I had thought s390x could be based on POWER8/9, but you're right, that doesn't appear to be the case. I apologise. Regardless, Go does consider S390x to be a separate port.

walki 10y ago

When POWER8 came out in 2014 I ran a couple of numerical benchmarks against Intel Xeon CPUs. In my benchmarks the POWER8 CPUs where slightly faster than Intel Xeon CPUs when the data fitted into the CPU's cache, so far so good (the speed advantage of the POWER8 CPU can easily be explained by the much higher clocking). But once I started running heavy benchmarks involving gigabytes of data the POWER8 CPUs where at least twice as slow. Now 3 years later POWER9 CPUs will come out that are about 1.5 times faster, in my opinion this is not enough to compete against Intel. Why would anybody want to get locked into a rare and more expensive CPU architecture if there is no speed advantage?

theandrewbailey 10y ago
Uptime. Reliability. Support. Feature set. Backwards compatibility.
rwmj 10y ago
You might have issues with the quality of your compiler or you might be using POWER7 code and/or have VSX disabled. IME POWER8 is somewhat faster than high end Xeons (although not in terms of price/performance).
- walki 10y ago
  I compiled my code using the latest GCC version available, I even made sure I used the right compiler flags to enable e.g. hardware POPCNT support. I know that IBM claimed that POWER8 CPUs were faster than Intel Xeon CPUs but I found the opposite to be true (at least for the benchmarks I cared about). You can also find many other benchmarks on the web which are in favor of Intel Xeon CPUs compared to POWER8. I am not against IBM POWER CPUs, I was just disappointed by POWER8...
  - rwmj 10y ago
    Fair enough. I'm sure it's workload dependent, and also I have not tested huge data sets. I'm most interested in the overhead of virtualization and (separately) compile times.

reacharavindh 10y ago

Why wouldn't IBM just have a simple product page for such an innovation? Like an Apple.com/iphone page for Power systems :-) Search for Power9 on IBM.com yields practically nothing. http://www.ibm.com/search/esas/search?q=power9&v=17&sn=23&us=utf&lang=en&cc=us&Search=Search#v%3D%2B1%26q%3Dpower9 http://www.ibm.com/search/esas/search?q=power9&v=17&sn=23&us... Perhaps the website is all maintained by the folks busy in "the cloud".

bryanlarsen 10y ago
Because this is just a technical preannouncement, you can't actually buy anything yet? A search for POWER8 returns lots of hits.
- reacharavindh 10y ago
  Agreed. I wasn't looking for a buy button. However, an authoritative info page by IBM itself providing technical specs and details of the platform would earn them good credits at least amongst the tech audience.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Also likely because it's not targeted at consumers in the same way. Intel doesn't release products like hat. Dell and Apple do for their products that integrate Intel chips though.

kbenson 10y ago

So, this is the chip that Google, Facebook and Rackspace used in their design for the open compute platform[1][2]. Maybe the entry level price will drop when like those are buying them (or their components) at scale. 1: http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-rackspace-power9-system/ http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-... 2: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-chips-hit-the-big-time-at-google.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-chips-hit-...

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Don't forget the Raptor Workstation. Allegedly, they plan to sell the thing for less than what SGI and Sun sold their boxes in the past. Using POWER8-9 chips in a market where ebay's best deal is $4,000 for a POWER8 CPU. ;)

crudbug 10y ago

24-core seems odd here, 32-core will be a more symmetric design ? What is main reason for this ? Cost ?

jeff_marshall 10y ago
Symmetric doesn't mean 'power of two'. Quite a few ICs have had even numbers of cores on them (I'm not aware of any with an odd number of cores, but that doesn't seem like the end of the world either). Lots of other things have to fit on the die, too (e.g. unified cache, which takes up a lot of real estate in chips that have them)
pdq 10y ago
I have no direct knowledge on IBM's processor, but from working on other processors, usually it's due to product yield. Today's cutting edge fabrication of multi-core chips makes it quite unlikely to get many dies to manufacture where all the CPU's are working at high speeds. Chips must run at a single frequency, so the slowest frequency is the bottleneck. If you fabricated 32 cores, and 1 fails testing, the chip is garbage. So the strategy is that the chips are fabricated with 32 cores, and then they speed-test the cores and take fastest 24 cores. The remaining 8 are fuse-disabled, and the end user sees a 24 core chip. Note this strategy also allows them to produce a 16-core chip with the same die, if for example only 20 cores work at high speeds. So you get both high yield and high speed chips.
- AlbertoGP 10y ago
  Yes, that's done some times but in this case, from the die picture posted here in another thread [1], it seems to have indeed 24 cores in 12 pairs (each of the "houses"). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351729 http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-hot-chips-power9-die.jpg http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-h...
shermanyo 10y ago
slightly off topic, but for some reason your comment made me remember the time I had to do some regression testing of a fix backported to a really old version of our software. We had to test against the OSs we'd since dropped support for, which included HP-UX, AIX and s390. The first time I heard someone mention a "31bit" build, I thought they were taking the piss :P It just seemed so odd at the time...

EdSharkey 10y ago

Do these IBM systems have anything like Intel ME that might be used by Big Bro for remote, covert rooting or subversion of the server? If yes on the standard model, can we order a version of these systems that lack that feature? I'd love to see some market forces nudging Intel to offer CPU's and Motherboards without ME.

mvdwoord 10y ago
Check out: http://openpowerfoundation.org http://openpowerfoundation.org and: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php Supposedly this could be a way out of Intel ME. Gotta see it first though, but I have one pre-ordered (whatever that means).

gpderetta 10y ago

So, is the 24 cores 4 threads variant just the same as the 12 cores 8 thread variants but with each (ridiculously) wide core statically partitioned in two? edit: should have read till the end.

ignasl 10y ago

I don't understand why IBM is not creating their own cloud services like Amazon, MS or Google. They have talent, they make their own hardware and software they are struggling a little bit with this new software landscape so why not just do it?

RandomBK 10y ago
Well, there's BlueMix, but it's a shameful shadow of what Amazon/Google/MS are offering.
velox_io 10y ago
They acquired Softlayer, and they're pushing BlueMix and Watson pretty hard - so they definitely have a footing in the cloud hosting/ services!