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The business model for these sorts of things should be "target ubiquity". Think GPUs. Huge computational power, low cost per computational power unit. The pr

by hpcjoe 9y ago

The business model for these sorts of things should be "target ubiquity". Think GPUs. Huge computational power, low cost per computational power unit. The problem becomes that Power9 is now effectively a substrate machine for NVidia GPUs more than it is a competitive offering by itself. In my previous life, working on building accelerated computing platforms a decade or more ago, some rules of thumb from customers were that they needed to see 5x at least performance delta to justify serious consideration. And that you couldn't charge 5x the price for that performance delta. So if power9 is 5x the speed of a Xeon in a set of relevant test cases (ignoring GPUs), and comparable price for a system, sure, it has a good chance of being successful. If not, it is questionable at best. As others have noted, cheap ... as in really dirty cheap ... development/test boxen for devs to build at home are critical for this. Back in my SGI/Cray days, I was advocating for, though failing to convince, management to enable us to sell older indys, indigos, etc. with IRIX and dev bundles for home/app dev use, at a very low price. My argument was (back then) that nothing could touch Irix for ease of use, and that it made sense to seed developers with this without worrying about making money on them, rather having them create the content that people demanded, that would help us sell machines. Management was worried it would decimate our developer revenue stream. Rather shortsighted I think in retrospect. Power9 looks poised to suffer the same fate, though not because of OS/compiler costs, but because the hardware will be un-affordable for pretty much everyone. This is why you have to target ubiquity. You need those developers. If they can't afford your boxes, or your stack, then you aren't going to get them.

ssfsa 9y ago
"nothing could touch Irix for ease of use" Love my Fuel. Wish I could still use it as a dialy driver (too expensive to run electrically). Management really destroyed you guys, eh?
mtgx 9y ago
> So if power9 is 5x the speed of a Xeon Is Xeon 5x the speed of Xeon? How do those institutions ever upgrade then? I think what you're really saying is Power9 needs to be 5x the speed compared to Xeons from 5 years ago or whatever. Because otherwise new Xeons would never replace older Xeons either, following that logic. Power9 and other Intel alternatives just need to show 1.5x-2x the value compared to Intel's latest.
- nine_k 9y ago
  I read it as the following: "If you offer a machine that has N times the performance of the current industry standard machine, it should cost cost kN times the current industry standard machine where k < 1". That is, there's no incentive to pay the cost of switching if you don't save any money in the longer term. And that "longer term" is usually but a few years.
  - hpcjoe 9y ago
    Yes, this was what I was trying to convey. Customers (when I ran my company) explained it to me in terms of Moore's law. They could wait 5 years for 1 order of magnitude (back then). Or I could deliver that (near) order of magnitude now, but the economics still had to work out. So kN where this was not tremendously different in TCO than existing solutions. kN might be 1.25x existing costs for 5x performance today. This was an actual example given to me. Customer then indicated that they'd be quite interested in performance at that price. k*N >> 2x, and it got problematic. So I had my range to work with.
nine_k 9y ago
> our developer revenue stream. This sounds terrible to me. From a POV of a platform vendor, the only "developer revenue stream" I'd care about would be popularity among developers. Give away the basic tools, sell slightly more specialized tools for the price of a pizza, get as many people hooked up as possible. Send your machines to universities at a discount. Sell older machines to hobbyists, and support the community. Help open-source projects run on your hardware and take advantage of its unique features (if any). Of course, there is a niche to actually sell top-notch enterprise-grade tools for your systems, too, because corporations gladly buy support and stability. But this is usually a tiny trickle compared to the hardware sales, and its very existence is entirely dependent on your system being widely popular and ubiquitous. As a bottom line, it's much better to get a 5% margin from a $100M market than a 25% margin from a $10M market.
- hpcjoe 9y ago
  Exactly
api 9y ago
I think this is exactly correct. It's why the Raspberry Pi is so brilliant for the ARM ecosystem. It gives devs an easy way to get exposed to ARM and paves the way for higher end ARM servers, laptops, desktops, etc. Power9 would really have to double down to have any chance of beating x64 and ARM, especially with RISC-V also about to enter the mix with its own advantages (openness). I think their only chance would be to actually sell it at cost or at a loss, at least at the entry level.
jabl 9y ago
I think POWER9 is not radically different from a Skylake Xeon, from a performance perspective. AFAICS, the selling point of this thing is that it has a higher BW and cache coherent connection between the GPU's and CPU's. Of course, some users like national labs, Google etc., might want to invest in this as a strategic investment, to keep Intel from becoming even more of a monopoly than they already are.
Keyframe 9y ago
Good example with IRIX. I liked it as well, but I liked HP-UX too. So, YMMV.
kev009 9y ago
There is a $400 4 core that Raptor Engineering is using in the Talos II. The top bin SO is only $5k, go look at Skylake pricing. This is dirt cheap. Hint, without specifics due to NDA, go talk to Supermicro sales directly about POWER systems.

by hpcjoe 9y ago

ssfsa 9y ago

"nothing could touch Irix for ease of use" Love my Fuel. Wish I could still use it as a dialy driver (too expensive to run electrically). Management really destroyed you guys, eh?

mtgx 9y ago

> So if power9 is 5x the speed of a Xeon Is Xeon 5x the speed of Xeon? How do those institutions ever upgrade then? I think what you're really saying is Power9 needs to be 5x the speed compared to Xeons from 5 years ago or whatever. Because otherwise new Xeons would never replace older Xeons either, following that logic. Power9 and other Intel alternatives just need to show 1.5x-2x the value compared to Intel's latest.

nine_k 9y ago
I read it as the following: "If you offer a machine that has N times the performance of the current industry standard machine, it should cost cost kN times the current industry standard machine where k < 1". That is, there's no incentive to pay the cost of switching if you don't save any money in the longer term. And that "longer term" is usually but a few years.
- hpcjoe 9y ago
  Yes, this was what I was trying to convey. Customers (when I ran my company) explained it to me in terms of Moore's law. They could wait 5 years for 1 order of magnitude (back then). Or I could deliver that (near) order of magnitude now, but the economics still had to work out. So kN where this was not tremendously different in TCO than existing solutions. kN might be 1.25x existing costs for 5x performance today. This was an actual example given to me. Customer then indicated that they'd be quite interested in performance at that price. k*N >> 2x, and it got problematic. So I had my range to work with.

nine_k 9y ago

> our developer revenue stream. This sounds terrible to me. From a POV of a platform vendor, the only "developer revenue stream" I'd care about would be popularity among developers. Give away the basic tools, sell slightly more specialized tools for the price of a pizza, get as many people hooked up as possible. Send your machines to universities at a discount. Sell older machines to hobbyists, and support the community. Help open-source projects run on your hardware and take advantage of its unique features (if any). Of course, there is a niche to actually sell top-notch enterprise-grade tools for your systems, too, because corporations gladly buy support and stability. But this is usually a tiny trickle compared to the hardware sales, and its very existence is entirely dependent on your system being widely popular and ubiquitous. As a bottom line, it's much better to get a 5% margin from a $100M market than a 25% margin from a $10M market.

hpcjoe 9y ago
Exactly

api 9y ago

I think this is exactly correct. It's why the Raspberry Pi is so brilliant for the ARM ecosystem. It gives devs an easy way to get exposed to ARM and paves the way for higher end ARM servers, laptops, desktops, etc. Power9 would really have to double down to have any chance of beating x64 and ARM, especially with RISC-V also about to enter the mix with its own advantages (openness). I think their only chance would be to actually sell it at cost or at a loss, at least at the entry level.

jabl 9y ago

I think POWER9 is not radically different from a Skylake Xeon, from a performance perspective. AFAICS, the selling point of this thing is that it has a higher BW and cache coherent connection between the GPU's and CPU's. Of course, some users like national labs, Google etc., might want to invest in this as a strategic investment, to keep Intel from becoming even more of a monopoly than they already are.

Keyframe 9y ago

Good example with IRIX. I liked it as well, but I liked HP-UX too. So, YMMV.

kev009 9y ago

There is a $400 4 core that Raptor Engineering is using in the Talos II. The top bin SO is only $5k, go look at Skylake pricing. This is dirt cheap. Hint, without specifics due to NDA, go talk to Supermicro sales directly about POWER systems.