9 ms·

One 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

One 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 ago
  Sales-commission driven product development.
- aseipp 9y ago
  They 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.
  - opencl 9y ago
    The mobo+single quad core CPU is $2,475, that's way more than the threadripper setup and the threadripper has 4x the core count.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      Threadripper also only has 8MB of L3 cache per CCX, and you can't hold more than 8MB of data. (true, there are 4x CCX per chip, but you can't "combine" the datasets. You're effectively limited to 8MB per 4-cores. To communicate cross-CCX requires an expensive ping to main-memory) Its a great architecture, but cross-CCX communication is relatively slow and definitely is a concern for some work problems. Power9 has 120MB of L3 cache that's shared between all cores. Which means you can ACTUALLY have a full 120MB-sized problem set and share all that information between cores. In short: Threadripper is great for sure, but its not necessarily a fair comparison. In an apples-to-apples comparison (ie: Monero Mining), it seems like a Power9 server is 3x better than Threadripper (Power9 gets ~3000 hash/sec, while Threadripper is roughly 1000 hash/sec). https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=POWER9-Crypto-Mining https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=POWER9-C... > Using the xmr-stak-power PPC64LE-focused Monero miner, they are seeing great performance with it running on dual pre-production 16-core POWER9 processors. There's a hash rate of 2945H/s while this POWER9 system is pulling 350 Watts DC power. And mind you: Monero / Cryptonight only uses 2MB of L3 per core. So that's practically Threadripper's ideal problem. Imagine if you actually had a dataset that was larger than the 8MB per CCX that Threadripper is limited to. Not to hate on Threadripper at all. Its cheap and high performance. I'm seriously considering a Threadripper system myself. But these Power9 specs are incredible, and I'd definitely like to test one if I could afford one.
      - dman 9y ago
        I really hope AMD releases a 7601 variant that is clocked similarly to the threadripper chips.
      - opencl 9y ago
        That's a dual socket system with 16 cores per socket. Dual socket Epyc 7351 (also 16 core per socket) is faster and more power efficient than that. 3200H/s at 332W. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=226&v=CS7M392Ia_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=226&v=CS7M392Ia_... I'm sure there are workloads that really do benefit from the huge unified L3, but it seems like a pretty small niche.
kev009 9y ago
Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.
- rwmj 9y ago
  Come on, you can buy a load of ARM 64 bit development boards starting from just a few tens of dollars. There is no problem at all getting access to ARM. And from there you can scale up to Cavium 2 or Amberwing which have Xeon-like performance (better than Xeon in some ways). If there's a problem with ARM I'd say it's still the lack of standardization, and also very few mid-range servers. POWER is nothing like this. There are no development boards at all, for anything less than $thousands, and the real servers have great performance but sky-high prices.
  - blattimwind 9y ago
    ARM dev boards are generally based on toy-sized SoCs, though.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      They are still useful though. If you want to build an 7-node cluster of 2GB nodes on a single Mini ITX motherboard, it's even cheap. And requires no messy cables. https://www.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard-with-7-module-slots-include-one-free-sopine-module-during-promotion-period https://www.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard-with-7-module-s... and seven https://www.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64 https://www.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64
      - planteen 9y ago
        That's neat. I had heard of the PINE64 board but never the SOPINE. Curious, have you implemented any projects on this? Seems like it might be neat for testing a small distributed system.
Spooky23 9y ago
IBM used power as a sort of step-down from Mainframe when big enterprises moved from cobol to java. That came with all of the bullshit like leasing CPU/hours and getting more software revenue using their "value unit" model. The other thing with power is that it has been a scale up vs. scale out product. That makes sense when you want to optimize your Oracle/SAP licensing or something similar. It doesn't make sense for modern use cases where you're using open-source or other solutions where growing infrastructure into your use case makes more economic sense.
rbanffy 9y ago
This. A million times this. There are no entry-level POWER machines, SPARC machines. There is no entry-level IBM i or Z. There isn't even a software emulator for i (and even for Z, where there is a very nice emulator, you can't legally run anything remotely current on non-IBM hardware). You can get a cheap POWER or SPARC on Ebay, with a sharp price drop when the equipment is EOL'ed, but that's no way to entice people to build new stuff on a platform. I love my PA-RISC, my RS/6000's and my SPARCstations, but, neat as they are, they aren't anything that would make me consider building for their modern descendants. And I won't pay more than a decent, proven, certainly useful Xeon workstation worth of money for a cool, but exotic-that-may-not-run-my-software-well, POWER9 performance equivalent. If IBM wants me to pay Xeon Platinum prices for their production gear, they'd better allow me to pay Core i prices for development gear, or else I'll just keep deploying on Xeon, which is good enough. Typed on a very comfortable and reasonably priced Core i7 laptop.
- walrus01 9y ago
  Seconding what you just said, and another thing is that the cost barrier to entry to developing x86-64 software on a very current Linux platform is almost zero. If you are a curious 15 year old who wants to learn Linux stuff you can get an older Core 2 Duo desktop PC for free, or almost free ($20) from a number of recycling places and install the latest debian-testing AMD64 on it. Put it on your home LAN, ssh into it, and start doing whatever you want. I know of companies that regularly throw away second generation core i5 dual and quad core systems with 8GB of RAM. The same software you develop on your $20 headless desktop PC can be easily moved over onto a $15/month KVM virtual machine somewhere in hosting. Or onto a used $250 1U server that you can pay to colocate somewhere for $65-100/month with bandwidth. All x86-64 platform. The massive, massive economies of scale for x86-64 platform stuff are going to be very hard to get people to move away from unless there is an amazingly compelling reason. The ability to cannibalize random recycled computers to make one working computer out of "free" parts is a big thing for the developing world.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    A very important point is that you mostly don't need to buy a new computer. Chances are a lot of teens already own perfectly good x86 computers that can do a lot of things they want and be the machines they learn to develop software on. IBM has to compete with free hardware.
Someone 9y ago
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get on board or what strings are attached to it, but https://www-356.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/stg_com_sys_power-development-platform https://www-356.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHand...: ”The Power Cloud that enables developers offers no-charge remote access to IBM hardware, including IBM POWER8, IBM POWER7+ and IBM POWER7 processor-based servers on the Linux, IBM AIX and IBM i operating systems.”
- justincormack 9y ago
  No real strings although the machines get recycled weekly and access is via vpn only.
hughhalf 9y ago
An interesting discussion to be sure. As far as cloud based access go, off the top of my head both Oregon State and Nimbix give access to P8/P9 instances for developers, free or cheap. One of our members, Raptor do a nice high performance dev workstation, pretty sure they do everything from a mobo+CPU combo to complete systems. I think lower end than that might well come, we certainly see it as something we'd like to facilitate through the OpenPOWER Foundation.
- hindsightbias 9y ago
  https://www.nimbix.net/ibm/ https://www.nimbix.net/ibm/
newman314 9y ago
So... I sit on the POWER Customer Advisory Board, what you have raised has certainly been something I've told IBM multiple times over the last few meetings I've had with them. I plan to continue pushing on this front.
- ethbro 9y ago
  From IBM's history, I'd assume this is chalked up to IBM institutional inertia (enterprise customers make big deployments, nothing else matters) than willfully doing it for some other profit-oriented purpose?
  - newman314 9y ago
    There are NDA items I can't get into but certainly it's not the case where I've just been shouting into the wind.
- PedroBatista 9y ago
  All of IBM DNA is structured to sell big contracts and deal with a relative small number of customers with very deep pockets. Even when they try some new trend ( aka cloud computing for the masses ) the economics aren't that good because the way they are structured, it's a culture thing. It's like Intel developing ARM CPUs, they have the means, but they can't do it successfully.
- ori_b 9y ago
  Thank you. I would love to meet around with POWER, but I don't have any way to get my hands on it for a price I can justify.
- wallnuss 9y ago
  One of the things that Nvidia quite successfully did (and Intel to some extent) is a ridiculously good academic outreach program. Making it easy (and cheap) for students and researchers to use you hardware leads to long-term buy-in.
ramereth 9y ago
We (Oregon State University Open Source Lab) have been working with IBM for the last few years to help with this problem. We host a set of P8 (and soon P9) machines for them so FOSS projects can work on porting issues. You're welcome to sign up if you're interested [1]. [1] http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/ http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/
- johnmertic 9y ago
  On the same note, we are providing the same for OSS projects wanting to leverage mainframe ( https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2018/01/08/make-mainframe-support-new-years-resolution-open-source-project-2018 https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2018/01/08/make-ma... ) and service that lets try a mainframe running Linux in the cloud ( https://www.openmainframeproject.org/trymainframe https://www.openmainframeproject.org/trymainframe )
simonebrunozzi 9y ago
I absolutely agree. It baffles me that after TWELVE years from the launch of S3 and EC2, IBM still hasn't understood what made them popular. (hint: the pay-as-you-go model).

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 ago
Sales-commission driven product development.
aseipp 9y ago
They 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.
- opencl 9y ago
  The mobo+single quad core CPU is $2,475, that's way more than the threadripper setup and the threadripper has 4x the core count.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    Threadripper also only has 8MB of L3 cache per CCX, and you can't hold more than 8MB of data. (true, there are 4x CCX per chip, but you can't "combine" the datasets. You're effectively limited to 8MB per 4-cores. To communicate cross-CCX requires an expensive ping to main-memory) Its a great architecture, but cross-CCX communication is relatively slow and definitely is a concern for some work problems. Power9 has 120MB of L3 cache that's shared between all cores. Which means you can ACTUALLY have a full 120MB-sized problem set and share all that information between cores. In short: Threadripper is great for sure, but its not necessarily a fair comparison. In an apples-to-apples comparison (ie: Monero Mining), it seems like a Power9 server is 3x better than Threadripper (Power9 gets ~3000 hash/sec, while Threadripper is roughly 1000 hash/sec). https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=POWER9-Crypto-Mining https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=POWER9-C... > Using the xmr-stak-power PPC64LE-focused Monero miner, they are seeing great performance with it running on dual pre-production 16-core POWER9 processors. There's a hash rate of 2945H/s while this POWER9 system is pulling 350 Watts DC power. And mind you: Monero / Cryptonight only uses 2MB of L3 per core. So that's practically Threadripper's ideal problem. Imagine if you actually had a dataset that was larger than the 8MB per CCX that Threadripper is limited to. Not to hate on Threadripper at all. Its cheap and high performance. I'm seriously considering a Threadripper system myself. But these Power9 specs are incredible, and I'd definitely like to test one if I could afford one.
    - dman 9y ago
      I really hope AMD releases a 7601 variant that is clocked similarly to the threadripper chips.
    - opencl 9y ago
      That's a dual socket system with 16 cores per socket. Dual socket Epyc 7351 (also 16 core per socket) is faster and more power efficient than that. 3200H/s at 332W. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=226&v=CS7M392Ia_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=226&v=CS7M392Ia_... I'm sure there are workloads that really do benefit from the huge unified L3, but it seems like a pretty small niche.

kev009 9y ago

Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.

rwmj 9y ago
Come on, you can buy a load of ARM 64 bit development boards starting from just a few tens of dollars. There is no problem at all getting access to ARM. And from there you can scale up to Cavium 2 or Amberwing which have Xeon-like performance (better than Xeon in some ways). If there's a problem with ARM I'd say it's still the lack of standardization, and also very few mid-range servers. POWER is nothing like this. There are no development boards at all, for anything less than $thousands, and the real servers have great performance but sky-high prices.
- blattimwind 9y ago
  ARM dev boards are generally based on toy-sized SoCs, though.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    They are still useful though. If you want to build an 7-node cluster of 2GB nodes on a single Mini ITX motherboard, it's even cheap. And requires no messy cables. https://www.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard-with-7-module-slots-include-one-free-sopine-module-during-promotion-period https://www.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard-with-7-module-s... and seven https://www.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64 https://www.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64
    - planteen 9y ago
      That's neat. I had heard of the PINE64 board but never the SOPINE. Curious, have you implemented any projects on this? Seems like it might be neat for testing a small distributed system.

Spooky23 9y ago

IBM used power as a sort of step-down from Mainframe when big enterprises moved from cobol to java. That came with all of the bullshit like leasing CPU/hours and getting more software revenue using their "value unit" model. The other thing with power is that it has been a scale up vs. scale out product. That makes sense when you want to optimize your Oracle/SAP licensing or something similar. It doesn't make sense for modern use cases where you're using open-source or other solutions where growing infrastructure into your use case makes more economic sense.

rbanffy 9y ago

This. A million times this. There are no entry-level POWER machines, SPARC machines. There is no entry-level IBM i or Z. There isn't even a software emulator for i (and even for Z, where there is a very nice emulator, you can't legally run anything remotely current on non-IBM hardware). You can get a cheap POWER or SPARC on Ebay, with a sharp price drop when the equipment is EOL'ed, but that's no way to entice people to build new stuff on a platform. I love my PA-RISC, my RS/6000's and my SPARCstations, but, neat as they are, they aren't anything that would make me consider building for their modern descendants. And I won't pay more than a decent, proven, certainly useful Xeon workstation worth of money for a cool, but exotic-that-may-not-run-my-software-well, POWER9 performance equivalent. If IBM wants me to pay Xeon Platinum prices for their production gear, they'd better allow me to pay Core i prices for development gear, or else I'll just keep deploying on Xeon, which is good enough. Typed on a very comfortable and reasonably priced Core i7 laptop.

walrus01 9y ago
Seconding what you just said, and another thing is that the cost barrier to entry to developing x86-64 software on a very current Linux platform is almost zero. If you are a curious 15 year old who wants to learn Linux stuff you can get an older Core 2 Duo desktop PC for free, or almost free ($20) from a number of recycling places and install the latest debian-testing AMD64 on it. Put it on your home LAN, ssh into it, and start doing whatever you want. I know of companies that regularly throw away second generation core i5 dual and quad core systems with 8GB of RAM. The same software you develop on your $20 headless desktop PC can be easily moved over onto a $15/month KVM virtual machine somewhere in hosting. Or onto a used $250 1U server that you can pay to colocate somewhere for $65-100/month with bandwidth. All x86-64 platform. The massive, massive economies of scale for x86-64 platform stuff are going to be very hard to get people to move away from unless there is an amazingly compelling reason. The ability to cannibalize random recycled computers to make one working computer out of "free" parts is a big thing for the developing world.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  A very important point is that you mostly don't need to buy a new computer. Chances are a lot of teens already own perfectly good x86 computers that can do a lot of things they want and be the machines they learn to develop software on. IBM has to compete with free hardware.

Someone 9y ago

I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get on board or what strings are attached to it, but https://www-356.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHandler/stg_com_sys_power-development-platform https://www-356.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHand...: ”The Power Cloud that enables developers offers no-charge remote access to IBM hardware, including IBM POWER8, IBM POWER7+ and IBM POWER7 processor-based servers on the Linux, IBM AIX and IBM i operating systems.”

justincormack 9y ago
No real strings although the machines get recycled weekly and access is via vpn only.

hughhalf 9y ago

An interesting discussion to be sure. As far as cloud based access go, off the top of my head both Oregon State and Nimbix give access to P8/P9 instances for developers, free or cheap. One of our members, Raptor do a nice high performance dev workstation, pretty sure they do everything from a mobo+CPU combo to complete systems. I think lower end than that might well come, we certainly see it as something we'd like to facilitate through the OpenPOWER Foundation.

hindsightbias 9y ago
https://www.nimbix.net/ibm/ https://www.nimbix.net/ibm/

newman314 9y ago

So... I sit on the POWER Customer Advisory Board, what you have raised has certainly been something I've told IBM multiple times over the last few meetings I've had with them. I plan to continue pushing on this front.

ethbro 9y ago
From IBM's history, I'd assume this is chalked up to IBM institutional inertia (enterprise customers make big deployments, nothing else matters) than willfully doing it for some other profit-oriented purpose?
- newman314 9y ago
  There are NDA items I can't get into but certainly it's not the case where I've just been shouting into the wind.
PedroBatista 9y ago
All of IBM DNA is structured to sell big contracts and deal with a relative small number of customers with very deep pockets. Even when they try some new trend ( aka cloud computing for the masses ) the economics aren't that good because the way they are structured, it's a culture thing. It's like Intel developing ARM CPUs, they have the means, but they can't do it successfully.
ori_b 9y ago
Thank you. I would love to meet around with POWER, but I don't have any way to get my hands on it for a price I can justify.
wallnuss 9y ago
One of the things that Nvidia quite successfully did (and Intel to some extent) is a ridiculously good academic outreach program. Making it easy (and cheap) for students and researchers to use you hardware leads to long-term buy-in.

ramereth 9y ago

We (Oregon State University Open Source Lab) have been working with IBM for the last few years to help with this problem. We host a set of P8 (and soon P9) machines for them so FOSS projects can work on porting issues. You're welcome to sign up if you're interested [1]. [1] http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/ http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/

johnmertic 9y ago
On the same note, we are providing the same for OSS projects wanting to leverage mainframe ( https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2018/01/08/make-mainframe-support-new-years-resolution-open-source-project-2018 https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2018/01/08/make-ma... ) and service that lets try a mainframe running Linux in the cloud ( https://www.openmainframeproject.org/trymainframe https://www.openmainframeproject.org/trymainframe )

simonebrunozzi 9y ago

I absolutely agree. It baffles me that after TWELVE years from the launch of S3 and EC2, IBM still hasn't understood what made them popular. (hint: the pay-as-you-go model).