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Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
- api 9y agoThat would be nice, but the problem with these systems historically is that they're ridiculously expensive compared to x64 servers for the end user. As a result end users and SMBs never get their hands on them and nobody develops anything for them or supports them.
- pm90 9y agowhich is why they're not being sold directly to enterprises but to Cloud Providers. I'm not a hardware engineer so not familiar with the fine print but what I've read so far seems to suggest that Power systems are more efficient at running Database-centric workloads and the power hypervisor is an order of magnitude more efficient than intel ones http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Intel-x86-and-IBM-POWER-CPUs-Which-When-Why http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Intel-x86-and-IBM-POWE.... Disclosure: I work on IBM cloud, but only tangentially with the Power systems.
- hsivonen 9y agoIs there a cloud provider that allows a EU-based natural-person customer buy a little Power 9 time for testing? Last I looked, Power cloud offerings required the customer to be a big company that buys a lot of compute.
- greglindahl 9y agoI think IBM Softlayer has been renting out small numbers of Power-based machines for a while now, enough to test with.
- pm90 9y agoCorrect! They rent out POWER8 systems: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/power https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/power. POWER9 systems don't seem to be available (yet). As for the future, I can't say much publicly (le sigh) but let me just say that personally I think future of power is bright, especially with cloud providers.
- Nomentatus 9y agoThe article addresses this at a couple of points, do you know factors which would counter its argument, or are you just pointing to the same history the article pointed to? e.g.: "Power 9 should do better than its predecessors given its costs, bandwidth, and ease of porting. Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50% compared to the Power 8, said IBM’s partners."
- marshray 9y agoIBM will never understand this but few, if any, architectures have made it into the datacenter that were not first affordable for experimenters and enthusiasts. The burden of proof is on those claiming the pricing does not present a barrier to entry to the ecosystem. I am curious about developing for Power. Please link me to an entry-level system I can buy on the web.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWell there are some counter examples, network switches, fiber channel, and Infiniband come to mind. And of course IBM "invented" the data center by defining environmental requirements for their machines in the 50's and 60's. Setting that aside though, its true that easy experimental access can allow a technology to "sneak in" to a market that previously ignored it, but that isn't really the case here. (nor was it the case for SPARC or Itanium) These systems are being built for folks who are going to deploy a lot of them and they already know their cost of ownership numbers for existing x64 boxes.
- rbanffy 9y agoThis is an excellent way to cater to the legacy app market, but not a very good way to ride the next wave. The next wave is probably running on commodity x86 hardware running Linux and using gamer-grade GPUs. They'll probably be first deployed to production on x86 virtual hardware in a cloud provider. If you want companies to adopt your technology, make their developers adopt it first. That's how most of the current enterprise DevOps tools happened.
- kev009 9y agoServer cost is dominated by storage at the moment. DRAM is also a large static cost with little negotiation room. The cost of a P9 and motherboard is a small subset of a system build and below the price of Skylake for me.
- shaklee3 9y agoI can say for sure they are not more expensive than comparable xeons. Even cheaper by some measures.
- Cyberdog 9y agoPrint version to avoid unnecessary pager: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333090&print=yes https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333090&print=ye...
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago> Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50% Glad to see them throwing in the towel on a pricey and proprietary component. Competition is good.
- kev009 9y agoNote that the other DIMMs aren't completely arbitrary, they are buffered and require Centaur controllers to allow for much greater capacity and bandwidth (at increased latency). But for scale out workloads the on chip DDR controllers are great for both lower cost and lower latency.
- hinkley 9y agoDidn’t IBM make exactly this same mistake thirty five years ago with PCs??
- wmf 9y agoWhich mistake exactly? Note that the Power9 processor itself is single-sourced from IBM so they don't have to worry about clones.
- Thaxll 9y agoCode running on Intel proc is much faster than anything else, I'm not sure how long it would take to catch up with the performance they provide.
- floren 9y agoDo you have actual benchmarks of x86 vs. Power 9 or are you just talking out your ass?
- Thaxll 9y agoWith all the stuff running on x86 for the past 30 years + all the perf optimizations in compilers it's not hard to figure. If ARM or Power were faster than x86 we would be using it right now on servers, most of the top500 HPC clusters run on x86_64 ( Intel Xeon ).
- bluedino 9y agoI can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely. Google, on the other hand would need a reason to switch. Somewhere there's a spreadsheet with a number for energy cost savings that would make it worth it for Google to switch architectures. I've heard it's as low as 10%.
- Tuna-Fish 9y ago> I can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely. China has Zhaoxin, which develops domestic x86-compatible cores that have received massive state funding, despite little commercial success. They way it looks, I think that China has decided to stick with x86, with Zhaoxin as an "escape valve" for the case where chip supply from Intel and AMD gets threatened.
- na85 9y agoIf I were China I'd be cultivating a friendly chip fab for my high assurance platforms. There's no way China trusts Intel or AMD chips for classified processing.
- bitwize 9y agoI can see China running with bootleg x86 chips.
- mariuolo 9y ago> I can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely. I thought they had a thing for MIPS64, at least in their supercomputers.
- wmf 9y agoMIPS was the thing in China... until it faded away. Then Power8 was the thing but it never shipped. Now we swear ARM is really the thing. Really for real this time.
- pm90 9y agoIf you read the article, they Demo'd Zaius (POWER9 based server) and apparently have a flag which compiles all (or most? Not clear) their apps to target POWER arch. Here is the Google Blog post introducing Zaius: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zaius-Google-and-Rackspaces-open-server-running-IBM-POWER9.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...
- joebergeron 9y agoIs "Power 9" purposefully a Magic reference? Or just a coincidence?
- Twirrim 9y agoThe CPU architecture has been called POWER since 1990, and this is the 9th generation of it, hence POWER9. MtG didn't come out until 1993. So yes, it's a co-incidence.
- Nomentatus 9y agoOr causation in the other direction.
- WorldMaker 9y agoA coincidence. This is referring to the 9th generation of IBM's POWER processors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_microprocessors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_POWER_microprocessors
- Twirrim 9y agoOne thing I think IBM has failed to grasp about POWER architecture is how to get people to use it. Lots of people in tech talk about being interested in trying it, it has a number of interesting characteristics, but the barrier for entry is fairly high. It's possible to get a POWER8 based server on Softlayer, IBM's cloud product, but not as a VM. You can get one as a bare metal server, but you can't get one for an hourly fee. You have to pay for a full month, which starts out at around $1000. There are very few individuals that would be willing to make such a commitment, but so many that would be willing to spend a few tens of dollars on spinning up a VM for a few hours to see if it provides value. If you want people to get excited about it, or interested in using it, you really need to make it easy for people to test it on a small scale.
- saas_co_de 9y ago> One thing I think IBM has failed to grasp about POWER architecture is how to get people to use it. I don't think IBM cares about people using it, especially people who can't afford $1000 dollars. They are only interested in high margin corp/gov pork barrel deals and need something that they can plausibly claim is superior in order to charge 10X for it.
- marshray 9y agoSales-commission driven product development.
- aseipp 9y agoThey definitely aren't charging 10X for it, it's very much in line and competitive at the Xeon level in terms of pricing, and they shine for certain workloads, especially with the new interconnects (CAPI, NVLink). POWER8 was harder to find, but the performance characteristics were good (in my experiments). And now the software is better (more solid ports) and cost is down. I'm eagerly awaiting the chips to hit this year and trying to find access to some. Plus IBM licenses the design these days (through OpenPOWER), so several of these players are building their own chips, boards, etc. Someone could inevitably enter the low-end market but lower-end devices have thinner margins and a lot more competitors. Even right now you can get real chips to go on a board on pre-order, just under $400 (TALOS II preorders) -- the mobo is the pricier part, but part of that is likely due to the BOM choices on that piece from Raptor Engineering. A smaller form factor motherboard (maybe with 1 socket) could land in the sub $2000 range for a whole mobo+cpu -- which is certainly competitive with similar HEDT/workstation prices[1]... [1] I just dropped $1,500 on a 1950X threadripper and associated mobo earlier this year, so this price range is certainly alive and kicking, IMHO.
- shrumm 9y agoFrom what I’ve read, POWER was affected by spectre/ meltdown too. However, Intels initial response to play down it’s significance can’t have gone well with large enterprise customers. In addition to the performance boosts the article refers to, I wonder how much of an impact the recent kerfuffle over Intels response had on POWER demand.
- classichasclass 9y agoIBM already released patches for this, at least for POWER7+. Interestingly the Meltdown issue seems "only" to affect the L1 cache, so L2 does not need to be evicted. Raptor says all Talos systems will be patched prior to shipping. https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Speculative_Execution_Vulnerabilities_of_2018 https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Speculative_Execution_Vulnera...
- newman314 9y agoPatching POWER for Spectre/Meltdown was a pain but we are done with it. You have to apply patches to the LPAR/OS, VIOS and firmware. IBM has acknowledged that there will be a performance hit but have not provided any quantified numbers that I have seen so far.
- hindsightbias 9y agohttps://ibm.biz/BdZjPy https://ibm.biz/BdZjPy "All POWER8 and POWER9 results in this table reflect performance with firmware and Operating System updates to mitigate Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures issue numbers ... known as Spectre and Meltdown"
- newman314 9y agoThanks. I also just found the rPerf and CPW consolidated spreadsheet from IBM (including pre and post Spectre/Meltdown numbers). https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/files/basic/anonymous/api/library/91037d4b-518a-4662-8832-0049a2d2563c/document/4c46604b-c783-4843-86d7-c34a8dbe0bc0/media https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/files/basic/ano...
- blattimwind 9y ago~Literally the exact same headline in 2015 with POWER8, no results then, (probably no results this time). I guess this is pretty much all just leverage to hold into Intel's face to get better prices out of them. "Look, we could totally convert to POWER..."
- classichasclass 9y agoI'm really excited to get my Talos finally in my hands (was one of the early orders). Good to see Tim Pearson and the demo system. I'm very hopeful the wait will be over soon.
- reirob 9y agoPlease let us know your experience with the Talos system.
- classichasclass 9y agoI'll definitely be posting unboxing, tests, progress reports, etc., to the TenFourFox Development blog.
- reirob 9y agoThat's great! Thank you already in advance! I am playing with the idea to get a TalosII computer. But so far I didn't find much experience reports from users and on top, on the https://raptorcs.com/ https://raptorcs.com/ they are only on pre-order.
- stamps 9y agoWas privacy your main driving factor for purchasing a Talos?
- classichasclass 9y agoNo, it was a workstation powerful enough to be a reasonable alternative to x86 that wasn't x86. I like Power, it's the architecture I'm most familiar with (other than the 6502 8-), and I think Intel needs a big kick right in the effective monopoly. Sure, I could have bought one of the AmigaOne systems, which would have been somewhat cheaper, but those are basically embedded systems in ATX cases. The 12-year-old Quad G5 I'm typing this on would mop the floor with one of those. This isn't a slam on the Amiga community, who tried hard to bring in systems at not-completely-eyewatering prices, but this ends up producing boutique systems running underwhelming chips in unimaginative designs because of the small numbers and the rigid price points. More to the point, I don't have a strong Amiga history, so the AmigaOS side of those machines would be mostly wasted on me. If there's going to be an architectural alternative in the grunt ballpark with x86, and I don't think ARM has gotten there yet, right now it's going to be Power ISA. And everyone in this thread complains about the cost. Understandable, but if no one steps up and buys one, no one will make any more of them and they will never achieve the necessary economies of scale. Fortunately I'm a PPC bigot^Wzealot with more money than sense. So I'll take the plunge. :) The fact the firmware is auditable, no management engine/PSP crap, I get full schematics, etc., is just a bonus in my view.
- walrus01 9y agoI will believe it when I can pull out my visa card, go to some online stores (such as those that resell Supermicro, Tyan, MSI, Quanta, etc), buy a Power9 capable ATX motherboard from one of the top-ten taiwanese motherboard manufacturers for $350, put a $300 CPU in it, $300 to $400 of RAM and build a 1U server with it. Until that happens it will not get into the hands of enough developers/sysadmin/devops/engineers to matter.
- hindsightbias 9y agohttps://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/ https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/
- euyyn 9y ago"Power 9 may dent x86 servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent test IBM systems" For those like me whose comprehension was hindered by all the upper casing.
- stonogo 9y agoAmazing how nobody talks about POWER unless they're in the middle of an IBM trade show (in this case, THINK2018).
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoSimilar discussion with POWER8 from 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519548
- myrandomcomment 9y agoThis is only good. Everyone is arguing here about stuff that really does not matter if this move the needle forward. x64 by AMD pushed Intel to do better. Things became faster / cheaper. AMD fell behind and Intel rested and priced for high end went up. AMD released Ryzen and all of the sudden we see movement from Intel again. ARM on the low end pushed Intel to look at their lower powered chips and try to do better. IBM pushing P9 to win at the top at a reason price point pushed on AMD and Intel. Competition is only good here and brings value to all of us. All of this is only good.
- sargun 9y agoI think the formula is simple — if the amount of idle developer time waiting for development gear + the cost of development gear + the cost of porting your software to POWER > the potential cost saving of POWER, don’t touch it. If POWER unlocks something fundamentally new and historically impossible on X86, like ARM unlocked cell phones, and such, maybe that’s another reason to try it. At the end of the day, nobody got fired for choosing x86. Its well understood, it’s cheap, development tools are accessible, and it works.
- quillo 9y agoI have a serious bee in my bonnet about POWER9. The architecture was something I was very excited about for low latency workloads; it seemed that only thing stopping IBM from overtaking x86 in this space was the actual availability of hardware. POWER9 has been "in the works" for, what, two years now [1]? Google have been running POWER9 internally for at least 12 months [2], and IBM seem to have been caught up in the AI hype train by pivoting the POWER9 to some kind of "AI processing system" [3]. Had the P9 been released before Skylake, it might have been successful. By the time it is GA, it will be competing with x86 chips two generations higher than were available at the original P9 announcements and SPECInt benchmarks. This has been made even more frustrating by the fact that Oracle effectively killed off SPARC during this time. Perhaps Fujitsu will continue to run with it, but I think it's fair to say that development will stagnate and support will dwindle as it is increasingly obscure and niche architecture. [1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-power9/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-po... [2] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zaius-Google-and-Rackspaces-open-server-running-IBM-POWER9.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-ibm-launched-instead-of-power9/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-i...
- mrbill 9y agoI don't ever see P9 getting price-competitive with x86 or ARM.
- snvzz 9y agoIt's not RISC-V. They want you to adopt some exotic, proprietary ISA. And they've forever been doing a poor job of it. Not a chance.
- jacksmith21006 9y agoHeard that Google has all their services ready to go on Power just needed to flip a switch.