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IBM will never understand this but few, if any, architectures have made it into the datacenter that were not first affordable for experimenters and enthusiasts.

IBM 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 ago
Well 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 ago
  This 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.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    No one has accused of IBM of 'riding the next wave', sometimes I wonder if they even start paddling as the wave swells :-). At least at Google the driving factor is total cost of ownership, full stop. When you need as much compute as they do to deliver on what they deliver, saving a few percent on the TCO flows right to the bottom line. That said I don't see them going full on with this technology if its QP$S[1] isn't competitive with x64. [1] Queries per dollar-second.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      Buying the perfect hardware for your workload works really well when you have a couple million boxes to run it. POWER9 has the insanely fast NVLink to connect to specialized silicon Google has enough volume to design and build. Where it can make a substantial dent in the x86 server is precisely this HPC niche. A 10% faster $300 box is worth $30 more, hardly enough to warrant extra work, but a 10% faster $10 million dollar machine is worth a million more.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    The article addresses this too, favorably. So I take it you're gainsaying the article but it's not quite clear just why.
YawningAngel 9y ago
Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? There are piles of Enterprise software written in Java that can be shifted to any architecture you care to name on a moment's notice. Lots of Java shops would bite your hand off if offered a 20% price cut for instances in exchange for switching architectures.
- marshray 9y ago
  > Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? A. Many of the people who today specify datacenter hardware came into that career as enthusiasts (aka "early adopters") and are more comfortable recommending what they have experience with. B. Enthusiasts bring the consumer volume that drives down production cost. This is a necessary driver of Moore's law.
  - YawningAngel 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure that the major Datacenter operators run quantitative analyses on all possible candidate chips. There aren't that many.
- vbezhenar 9y ago
  JVM is heavily optimized for x64.
  - sophacles 9y ago
    IBM has their own jvm for power9 across all their OS families.
  - YawningAngel 9y ago
    If the hardware is good enough, someone will write a JVM for it that's competitive. As the other respondent notes, IBM can do it themselves.
aidenn0 9y ago
SPARC?
- marshray 9y ago
  Entry level workstations were readily available and all over universities.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    It's worth noting that even entry-level machines were quite expensive compared to midrange PCs and were more or less in the same price range as high-end machines. If, however, IBM can get me a 32GB single-core/8-thread POWER9 machine for the same price Lenovo can give me a performance-equivalent 4-core/4-tread Xeon, I'll be tempted. Worst case scenario, I'll still run my x86 workloads on my trusty Lenovo and use the POWER9 as a nice X terminal.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
^^^ this should be the top comment. Sun/SPARC for example, benefited greatly in Dot-Com v1.0 because so many universities had great prices via edu discounts. The sysadmins and other Unix users all cut their teeth on Sun boxes; so when they got jobs they took along their familiarity with Sun, which resulted in a lot of sales.
- antod 9y ago
  And as a developer you could get a basic v100 (or was it v120?) 1U 'server' from Sun really cheaply. Sure it was a single CPU with a PATA disk and no hotswap or redundant components, but it was a cheap SPARC you could test your stuff on.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Well 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 ago
This 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.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  No one has accused of IBM of 'riding the next wave', sometimes I wonder if they even start paddling as the wave swells :-). At least at Google the driving factor is total cost of ownership, full stop. When you need as much compute as they do to deliver on what they deliver, saving a few percent on the TCO flows right to the bottom line. That said I don't see them going full on with this technology if its QP$S[1] isn't competitive with x64. [1] Queries per dollar-second.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Buying the perfect hardware for your workload works really well when you have a couple million boxes to run it. POWER9 has the insanely fast NVLink to connect to specialized silicon Google has enough volume to design and build. Where it can make a substantial dent in the x86 server is precisely this HPC niche. A 10% faster $300 box is worth $30 more, hardly enough to warrant extra work, but a 10% faster $10 million dollar machine is worth a million more.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  The article addresses this too, favorably. So I take it you're gainsaying the article but it's not quite clear just why.

YawningAngel 9y ago

Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? There are piles of Enterprise software written in Java that can be shifted to any architecture you care to name on a moment's notice. Lots of Java shops would bite your hand off if offered a 20% price cut for instances in exchange for switching architectures.

marshray 9y ago
> Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? A. Many of the people who today specify datacenter hardware came into that career as enthusiasts (aka "early adopters") and are more comfortable recommending what they have experience with. B. Enthusiasts bring the consumer volume that drives down production cost. This is a necessary driver of Moore's law.
- YawningAngel 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the major Datacenter operators run quantitative analyses on all possible candidate chips. There aren't that many.
vbezhenar 9y ago
JVM is heavily optimized for x64.
- sophacles 9y ago
  IBM has their own jvm for power9 across all their OS families.
- YawningAngel 9y ago
  If the hardware is good enough, someone will write a JVM for it that's competitive. As the other respondent notes, IBM can do it themselves.

aidenn0 9y ago

SPARC?

marshray 9y ago
Entry level workstations were readily available and all over universities.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  It's worth noting that even entry-level machines were quite expensive compared to midrange PCs and were more or less in the same price range as high-end machines. If, however, IBM can get me a 32GB single-core/8-thread POWER9 machine for the same price Lenovo can give me a performance-equivalent 4-core/4-tread Xeon, I'll be tempted. Worst case scenario, I'll still run my x86 workloads on my trusty Lenovo and use the POWER9 as a nice X terminal.

patrickg_zill 9y ago

^^^ this should be the top comment. Sun/SPARC for example, benefited greatly in Dot-Com v1.0 because so many universities had great prices via edu discounts. The sysadmins and other Unix users all cut their teeth on Sun boxes; so when they got jobs they took along their familiarity with Sun, which resulted in a lot of sales.

antod 9y ago
And as a developer you could get a basic v100 (or was it v120?) 1U 'server' from Sun really cheaply. Sure it was a single CPU with a PATA disk and no hotswap or redundant components, but it was a cheap SPARC you could test your stuff on.