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You can validate pricing on https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html. I am one of the first buye

by kev009 8y ago

You can validate pricing on https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html. I am one of the first buyers with a dual 22 core system, so I'd be happy to run any numeric benchmarks if people have ideas. Basically you get 88 threads per socket, generally will have "bonus cache" (this is a 24-core die so you get free cache if the fused off cores are not adjacent) so 120MB per socket, much higher clock speed, rediculous I/O bandwidth to PCIe 4.0, CAPI and NVLink. The speeds and feeds are simply higher than anything intel has been able to muster to market. If you have enough volume, getting the La Grange POWER9 CPU Google and Rackspace are using would be even better than the Sforza Raptor's Talos II uses -- that gets you 8 DDR4 channels. I know basic pricing rumors and it is good.

ksec 8y ago
Do you know if SuperMicro are going to have any POWER9 systems? ( I think they had announcement but there are no information on their webpages ) Given the insane amount of bandwidth, I wonder if Netflix will use this for their Open Appliance. If we are sticking to x86 it looks like we have to wait till Zen3 from AMD to get something equivalent, that is 2019 or 2020.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  Wait, what's wrong with EPYC? EPYC 7601P is 32-cores for roughly $2200 or so. And unlike Power9, the motherboard is "only" $550 or so (Power9's cheapest motherboard is like $1000 from Raptor Talos II Lite). From what I've seen, EPYC roughly has the same Monero-mining speeds as Power9. All other benchmarks are in favor of EPYC, as x86 optimized code (Z-lib, H264, Apache, Postgres... etc. etc.) doesn't perform as well on Power9. Power9 scales higher, but that gets cost-prohibitive. I think the typical person will only buy computers that cost less than $15,000 (Dual EPYC 7601 / SuperMicro system / 256GB of RAM)
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    There's nothing wrong with it, as much as there is nothing wrong with plain Xeon. My thing with them is that they are boring - they look too much like the computer I use to work. In order to be inspiring, you don't need only fast. You need different. POWER is different in the sense it has both the fast cores and threads of a Xeon, but coupled to a different ISA and things like NVLink. Phi is different because of the integrated HBM and the crazy number of threads. Both invite us to build applications differently and that's what makes them exciting.
keldaris 8y ago
If you get some free time to run benchmarks, the Phoronix open benchmark suite (OpenBenchmarking.org) or even just basic LINPACK would be a great start. There's such a lack of public hard data on these systems it's hard to evaluate where they stand in terms of cost/performance even for very standard workstation/HPC workloads.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  HPCG seems more realistic than Linpack. Based on the Phoronix tests I've seen, AMD EPYC or AMD Threadripper is better for cost / performance. But Xeon Phi is an accelerator over PCIe. Its more comparable to a NVidia Tesla V100. You write specialized software to run on the Xeon Phi (even though it shares the x86 instruction set, its architecture is alien so it requires the programmer to specifically optimize for the Phi platform).
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    > But Xeon Phi is an accelerator over PCIe. It used to be that way, but those products were discontinued. Modern Phi's are CPUs that can operate without a host computer.
shaklee3 8y ago
I'd be curious to see the standard memory bandwidth tests that anandtech does. I can't find anything about that online. They claim to have higher bw than Intel and AMD, but that will depend on how many threads are running. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ I'm fairly certain it won't perform very well as-written unless the compiler is mature and translates to simd. Btw, we met at the dpdk conference.
imtringued 8y ago
I'm not sure why you are comparing them on a threads per socket basis. Each Xeon Phi core has 4 threads which results in 288 threads per socket. [1] At those core counts you are often no longer limited by the CPU. Memory bandwidth starts playing a more significant role which is why the Xeon Phi also has 16GB of high bandwidth memory with more than 400GB/s. Does the Power9 system use a similar memory technology? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Mill
- dragontamer 8y ago
  Power9 is cool, but its really not comparable. Power9 has a huge L3 cache, 10MB every 2 cores. So a 22-core machine would have 110 MB of L3 cache. In contrast, Xeon Phi is connected to HBM2 / Stacked Memory. So while it doesn't have as large of an L3 cache, its main-memory is significantly faster. Finally, you can stick a Xeon Phi into each PCIe x16 slot of your servers. Really, Xeon Phi is a competitor to NVidia's Tesla V100, if anything.

by kev009 8y ago

ksec 8y ago

Do you know if SuperMicro are going to have any POWER9 systems? ( I think they had announcement but there are no information on their webpages ) Given the insane amount of bandwidth, I wonder if Netflix will use this for their Open Appliance. If we are sticking to x86 it looks like we have to wait till Zen3 from AMD to get something equivalent, that is 2019 or 2020.

dragontamer 8y ago
Wait, what's wrong with EPYC? EPYC 7601P is 32-cores for roughly $2200 or so. And unlike Power9, the motherboard is "only" $550 or so (Power9's cheapest motherboard is like $1000 from Raptor Talos II Lite). From what I've seen, EPYC roughly has the same Monero-mining speeds as Power9. All other benchmarks are in favor of EPYC, as x86 optimized code (Z-lib, H264, Apache, Postgres... etc. etc.) doesn't perform as well on Power9. Power9 scales higher, but that gets cost-prohibitive. I think the typical person will only buy computers that cost less than $15,000 (Dual EPYC 7601 / SuperMicro system / 256GB of RAM)
- rbanffy 8y ago
  There's nothing wrong with it, as much as there is nothing wrong with plain Xeon. My thing with them is that they are boring - they look too much like the computer I use to work. In order to be inspiring, you don't need only fast. You need different. POWER is different in the sense it has both the fast cores and threads of a Xeon, but coupled to a different ISA and things like NVLink. Phi is different because of the integrated HBM and the crazy number of threads. Both invite us to build applications differently and that's what makes them exciting.

keldaris 8y ago

If you get some free time to run benchmarks, the Phoronix open benchmark suite (OpenBenchmarking.org) or even just basic LINPACK would be a great start. There's such a lack of public hard data on these systems it's hard to evaluate where they stand in terms of cost/performance even for very standard workstation/HPC workloads.

dragontamer 8y ago
HPCG seems more realistic than Linpack. Based on the Phoronix tests I've seen, AMD EPYC or AMD Threadripper is better for cost / performance. But Xeon Phi is an accelerator over PCIe. Its more comparable to a NVidia Tesla V100. You write specialized software to run on the Xeon Phi (even though it shares the x86 instruction set, its architecture is alien so it requires the programmer to specifically optimize for the Phi platform).
- rbanffy 8y ago
  > But Xeon Phi is an accelerator over PCIe. It used to be that way, but those products were discontinued. Modern Phi's are CPUs that can operate without a host computer.

shaklee3 8y ago

I'd be curious to see the standard memory bandwidth tests that anandtech does. I can't find anything about that online. They claim to have higher bw than Intel and AMD, but that will depend on how many threads are running. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ I'm fairly certain it won't perform very well as-written unless the compiler is mature and translates to simd. Btw, we met at the dpdk conference.

imtringued 8y ago

I'm not sure why you are comparing them on a threads per socket basis. Each Xeon Phi core has 4 threads which results in 288 threads per socket. [1] At those core counts you are often no longer limited by the CPU. Memory bandwidth starts playing a more significant role which is why the Xeon Phi also has 16GB of high bandwidth memory with more than 400GB/s. Does the Power9 system use a similar memory technology? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Mill

dragontamer 8y ago
Power9 is cool, but its really not comparable. Power9 has a huge L3 cache, 10MB every 2 cores. So a 22-core machine would have 110 MB of L3 cache. In contrast, Xeon Phi is connected to HBM2 / Stacked Memory. So while it doesn't have as large of an L3 cache, its main-memory is significantly faster. Finally, you can stick a Xeon Phi into each PCIe x16 slot of your servers. Really, Xeon Phi is a competitor to NVidia's Tesla V100, if anything.