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Basic Blackbird Bundle with 4-core IBM Power9 CPU

155 points by pentestercrab 8y ago

dis-sys 8y ago
a little bit disappointed that the motherboard only support up to 8 cores and actually comes with a 4 cores processor. such low core count is making the product not that attractive - I can go with µATX MB + Xeon if I want computing power or a decent 6/8-core ARM board for smaller form factor. to just try a different ISA, I'd probably choose RISC-V to maximize my potential investment return.
- jlgaddis 8y ago
  The same "bundle" with the 8-core POWER9 processor [0] is also available for pre-order. [0]: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html
- gcb0 8y ago
  this will give much more performance and compatibility than risc, at least if it ships soon I guess.
  - Lio 8y ago
    The Power9, like all PowerPC chips, is a RISC based chip. Do you mean than RISC-V?
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  Considering you don't even mention the openness of the raptor products vs. the xeon alternative, you're not the target market.
  - dis-sys 8y ago
    I'd be heading to RISC-V for openness.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
      You can buy riscv in a year or 2 (for desktop), or wait 5 years for it to become performance competitive. Or you can buy power9 today (or end of 2019 for a cheaper model) and get a system that already exists, has silicon in production, and already appears to be performance competitive with Intel. Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first because I'm not necessarily in a place where I can justify the money even for an open platform, but let's not pretend that there are massive benefits to both.
      - newnewpdro 8y ago
        > Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first This is pretty much my threshold as well, but when I actually think about these numbers and put them in perspective with regards to how much I used to spend on 486/pentium desktop computers when they were modern, and adjust those numbers for inflation, it's downright absurd that I'm not willing to spend what raptorcs is asking for a modern, open platform, in 2018 dollars.
  - 2sk21 8y ago
    This is really remarkable "you can audit and modify any portion of the open source firmware on the Blackbird™ mainboard, all the way down to the CPU microcode."
- floatboth 8y ago
  Or a 4-core ITX ARM board with almost[1] 100% open TianoCore UEFI firmware with ACPI and with x86 emulation for VBIOS [2] that allows video output from the EFI framebuffer… with a DIMM included… for a THIRD of the price of the Blackbird: https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/macchiatobin/ https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/macchiatobin... [1] one 12kb blob: https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/binaries-marvell/blob/binaries-marvell-armada-18.06/mrvl_scp_bl2_mss_ap_cp1_a8040.img https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/binaries-marvel... [2] https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platform/issues/2#issuecomment-385216950 https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf...
  - tpearson-raptor 8y ago
    Not really blob free then, is it? ;-) Do you get full documentation of the processor internals and board schematics with that kit? How about an owner-controlled secure boot, or is that remaining blob vendor-locked / vendor signature controlled? The most pertinent point though is that the POWER9 will run circles around the ARM board in terms of performance, guaranteed. We're using the POWER9 as a full desktop replacement, ARM never really worked out in that role due to general performance issues / lagginess vs. the x86 boxes that were being replaced. A ~2GHz embedded ARM core isn't going to match up to a ~4GHz POWER core, at least not favorably -- you do get what you pay for! EDIT: On further comparison the Blackbird has double the SATA ports, double the SATA speed, two PCIe Gen 4 slots (a x16 and a x8) instead of a single Gen 3 x4, and quadruple the USB 3.0 ports. Really, the Blackbird is in a different class from that ARM system; it's competing against Intel and AMD boards, not against the low end ARM offerings.
    - floatboth 8y ago
      Of course 4GHz and PCIe x16 are very desirable, but $1000 for just the board+CPU bundle is waaaay too much if you just want to play with a non-x86 desktop. With AMD, you can fit a whole build (with an 8-core CPU, RAM, SSD and a good GPU) into $1000. Your mainboard is just ridiculously expensive. Yes, I understand that the volume is low and there was a lot of new R&D and whatnot… but it's still just a big PCB. What costs so much? Is PCIe gen 4 (that I don't need) contributing to the cost a lot?
- amboar 8y ago
  Bear in mind the P9 chip does SMT4, so four cores gives you 16 hardware threads, and 8 cores 32 threads etc.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  Power9 is one of the highest instructions-per-clock architectures in the world. Power9 just has relatively weak vector units: only 128-bit. (Even AMD Threadripper has support for 256-bit. Power9 128-bit is executed per super-slice, so its really 2x64-bit, to compare against AMD's 2x128-bit support) Otherwise, its throughput is downright insane. 6-issues per clock (Skylake only has 6 if its in the uOp cache: otherwise the decoder only pushes 4 uOps), 10MB of L3 per pair of cores. That's 20MB of L3 on the 4-core, and 110MB of L3 cache on the 22-core. ----- As far as price/performance goes, the 18-core / 72-thread chip seems best. But the 4-core / 16-thread or 8-core / 32-thread chips aren't bad, as far as I can tell. The main issue is that most compute-heavy code these days use those vector units (2x128 on AMD, 2x256 on Intel). But if you got a big GPU for SIMD / vectorized ops, then that disadvantage kinda goes away. GPUs are way fatter than Intel or AMD. The other issue is that AMD is offering cores at stupidly low prices. AMD Threadripper and EPYC are the machines to look at for raw CPU power these days. But I'd argue that the 18-core Power9 ($1,050) is at a good price/performance level. If you can find any application that benefits from the stupid-high 90MB of L3 cache on the 18-core, then you're more or less golden. I'd bet that databases love that L3 cache.
  - dis-sys 8y ago
    thanks for the detailed info. phoronix.com just published some Power9 vs. Xeon vs Epyc benchmarks[1]. It is actually not on par with Xeon/Epyc. also note that the motherboard used by those Power9 has a price tag of $2499, when a dual socket LGA3647 motherboard from a first tier vendor can be purchased at $400 delivered. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-x86-servers&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-x...
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      A lot of the "weakness" there is due to the weak 4x64-bit vector units equipped on the Power9. Again: 4x64-bit vector units (Power9) simply has less throughput than 4x128-bit (EPYC) units, which has less throughput than 3x512-bit (Xeon Gold) vector units. On the few tests which don't have anything to do with vector units, Power9 does incredibly well. See 7-Zip Compression, Stockfish, Fhourstones, LLVM compiles. Power9 is very, very far ahead of the game here. When vector units (ie: OpenMP or intrinsics) are involved: such as Parboil, Gimp, x264, Rodinia, etc. etc. the Power9 does very poorly. ------------- Something else I've noticed: Power9 has a lot of latency behind its units: it is always 2-cycles or 3-cycles of latency (while EPYC or Skylake have many operations with 1-cycle of latency, like add or subtract). Power9 relies upon instruction-level parallelism to get things done. So there are a few cases like the Rust Mandelbrot benchmark, which surely hits that latency problem, while the Rustlang Prime benchmark shows off the ILP goodness the system offers.
KaiserPro 8y ago
How many threads per corse does it support? or is that a concept that doesn't apply to power9 procs?
- tpearson-raptor 8y ago
  All POWER products offer SMT. The POWER9 OpenPOWER chips are all 4 threads per core (SMT4), so a 4 core device presents 16 logical cores to the OS. POWER's hardware threading system is also unique and has high performance compared to offerings from other vendors (mainly x86) -- check out the processor user manual [1] for all the details. [1] https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/8/89/POWER9_um_OpenPOWER_v20GA_09APR2018_pub.pdf https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/8/89/POWER9_um_OpenPOWER_...
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    > The POWER9 OpenPOWER chips are all 4 threads per core (SMT4) Some are SMT8. The ones that are supported by this motherboard are "only" SMT4 however. I think its "OpenPOWER" chips are at least 4-threads per core.
    - classichasclass 8y ago
      Cumulus are the SMT-8s. I think you're thinking of the PowerNV vs PowerVM distinction.
sliken 8y ago
So basically a quad CPU + motherboard for $1000. IBM doesn't seem confident enough in the performance of the power 9 to publish standard benchmarks like CPU2017. So if you want something with published scores on a wide variety of benchmarks that are included in CPU2017 get an Epyc or a Xeon.
- tpearson-raptor 8y ago
  Have you seen https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2018q3/cpu2017-20180805-08109.html https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2018q3/cpu2017-20180... from back in July? There are more submissions as well if you want to browse around a bit.
  - sliken 8y ago
    I looked around on the floating point, and found none. There are some integer throughput results. Is the power9 only competitive for integer related workloads? E950 finds results on the Integer throughput list, but not the FP throughput list.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Ah, looks like someone formatted the IBM entries incorrectly, at least unlike all the AMD and Intel entries I could find. Usually the description has a CPU entry something like "Intel Xeon Gold 6148". The IBM entries have things like "3.4 - 3.8 GHz, 40 core, SLES". So if you search any of the lists for "power9" you don't find anything.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Phoronix just did a comparison. Power9 22 core, did well on 7zip, octave, and rust, but lost most of the benchmarks to the Xeon and Epyc dual sockets. Seems like Power9 does really well on interpreters.
profquail 8y ago
This is great! I’ve been hoping someone — IBM or one of it’s partners like Raptor or Gigabyte — would make a lower-end POWER8/9 system available. The price of this board ($1K) is much more affordable for a hobbyist developer who wants to tinker with POWER, try porting some open-source projects, etc.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Yeah, this is what was exciting about the HiFive Unleashed: it's an actual Linux-capable RISC-V board with standard peripherals. The only downside is that it's about $4,000USD, all-told.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  The price is a little high, sadly. I don't blame them, it can't be that cheap to design and produce, and it really is what I would like to see as a desktop option. I mean it really sucks that we cry for non-X86 desktops, and when someone finally delivers, we complain about price. It's just little hard to justify for something I'd basically buy as a "toy".
  - bradfa 8y ago
    The price isn't THAT high! Compare to an Intel 16 thread CPU + motherboard with ECC RAM and the ability to address more than 64GB of RAM. You're well into Xeon parts probably in the $300-400 range just for the CPU, then to get a decent motherboard is probably another $200. So you're paying a 2x premium for this Raptor Computing offering, that's really not THAT bad of pricing! This pricing is an order of magnitude better than some of the previous Raptor Computing POWER systems which will hopefully open up their market to a wider audience and help drive down prices in the future.
    - mrweasel 8y ago
      That's true, I didn't really considered what the same money would buy me in x86 hardware. Still I think the point is that many of us would like something like a Power9 for our desktop, but we honestly don't need that level of hardware, so we hope for something around half price to justify buying what is essentially a luxury item.
LeonM 8y ago
From the specs: > 2 Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet ports > 1 Isolated BMC Gigabit Ethernet port What does 'isolated' mean in the context? AFAIK ethernet connections are always isolated using transformers, so I don't suppose they are talking about galvanic isolation here. Can anyone elaborate?
- pabs3 8y ago
  Some BMCs have the ability to listen on both the normal ports and the BMC-dedicated port (or just the sole normal port). Some do that all the time and some do that when the BMC-dedicated port isn't plugged in. I think this research was where I heard about this: https://lwn.net/Articles/630778/ https://lwn.net/Articles/630778/
  - LeonM 8y ago
    Makes sense, thanks!
- ZiiS 8y ago
  They mean it is a separate physical conector. Some motherboards reuse an Ethernet port.
- deelowe 8y ago
  They don't mean electrically isolated. This means there is a dedicated ethernet port that's isolated to just the BMC (physically incapable of speaking to the IBM processor). It's a security feature.
- stewart-ibm 8y ago
  On many servers you can have a single physical ethernet port that works for both the service processor (BMC) and host processor. If you want someone to have access to only the host system and not the BMC then you place your trust in a bunch of hardware and firmware that does the sharing of the port. Having the port shared can save in cabling, but you trade that off for trusting some firmware to do the right thing. Isolated ports mean that you can have one cable that goes to the BMC and only the BMC, and one that goes to the host and only the host. i.e. you place trust for isolation in the fact that two cables go to two different places, and don't involve another bit of firmware.
kev009 8y ago
We have FreeBSD running with radeon driver and will have a ~linux4.20 amdgpu driver up by the time blackbird ships. Most the performance work is usable, our goal is to have a usable daily driver around Q1 https://github.com/POWER9BSD/freebsd https://github.com/POWER9BSD/freebsd
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  That's great, I've been hoping to see amdgpu support on FreeBSD. Thanks for your hard work!
- equalunique 8y ago
  This is fantastic news. I am glad this showed up as the top comment for me.
na85 8y ago
Anyone know when these are supposed to ship?
- detaro 8y ago
  from the page: > Expected to ship late Q1 2019
tareqak 8y ago
What is the space to the immediate right of the right RAM slot for? (https://static.rptorcs.com/BK1B01/images/boardlarge.png https://static.rptorcs.com/BK1B01/images/boardlarge.png) The white connector almost looks like an M.2 connector.
- LeonM 8y ago
  I've send an e-mail to Raptor about this (and the other connectors), I'll share if I get an answer
- jandrese 8y ago
  I don't think that's M.2, but I don't know what it is. It looks kind of like a hat connector of some kind. GPIO?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  I'm going to take a wild guess and say its an OCuLink connector. OCuLink can turn into M.2, U.2, or a variety of SATA connectors.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- hlandau 8y ago
  It's a connector for the optional FlexVer module they intend to release in the future. It's not OCuLink.
  - LeonM 8y ago
    Thanks! More information on FlexVer: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexver_intro.pdf https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve... > FlexVer™ is a new, owner-controlled security technology designed to safeguard critical data and applications in the event of software or hardware tampering. FlexVer™ allows a system to be provisioned in a trusted physical environment, then deployed to an untrustworthy physical location while retaining system integrity.
ncmncm 8y ago
It doesn't seem to say anywhere what drives the HDMI output, just "2D". Is that just for connection to a PCI card? Or is there some rudimentary VESA frame-buffer chip on it, just to watch it boot?
- MrRadar 8y ago
  It has a server-style BMC which drives the HDMI port. It's only a basic 2D framebuffer device (with basic 3D "support" through the LLVMpipe OpenGL/Mesa software rasterizer), though Raptor Computer claims it's good enough for daily use. Obviously if you need high-performance 3D or more than 1 display you need would an add-in card.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    You might run into problems with compositing window managers on that interface. Gnome supposedly has a pure-software fallback now, but it may be less than ideal. Most systems assume a minimal level of 3D acceleration support for desktop use. Watching video, browsing the web, etc... could suck down a lot more CPU than you're used to. NBD if you're using it as a server, but problematic as a daily driver desktop.
    - tpearson-raptor 8y ago
      For what it's worth, LLVMPipe normally picks up the basic 3D requirements without much trouble. When using Xorg though you definitely want to enable the 2D acceleration and disable Glamor; the chip is a fairly decent 2D framebuffer. On a slightly different topic, I'm not sure this push to force libre software into requiring a 3D GPU is a good idea while every 3D capable card / chip currently being made relies on proprietary firmware enforcing various forms of DRM. If at some point the already existing DRM starts being extended to protect modern 3D support (e.g consider no 4k /8k 3D allowed without DRM handshake), there is no reasonable fallback for the desktop (leaving games etc. aside); this is not a good place to be IMO.
- stewart-ibm 8y ago
  It'd be better to watch it boot over serial (which can also be done via SSH to the BMC) rather than this graphics port. the BMC chip (ast2500) has support for being a GPU for the host processor. It's a good old pretty dumb 2D framebuffer. Good for running an OS installer on. Because (currently, we're working on it) boot time is more than a couple of seconds before we could bring up a discrete GPU, this connector will get you boot progress (and let you see an error) that occurs before we could fire up a PCIe GPU.
dragontamer 8y ago
Hmmmm... the $1,129.99 for the "Lite" motherboard seems like a better value, especially because the "Lite" motherboard supports 22-core (88-thread) CPUs... or more importantly... the 18-core (72-thread) CPU, which seems like a good value. However, at $799 + 4-cores or 8-cores, the main purpose of this board is for "toy" uses. There's no way that the 4-core IBM is going to be anywhere as fast as a 16c/32t Threadripper 1950x (going for ~$450 these days btw), but it would be the cheapest machine to build for the Power9 system. So that alone is important. The "Basic" box would be for developer machines, while the "production" machine would be 22-core, or maybe 12-core SMT8 (the "thicker" IBM design where 8-SMT is possible). Consider this: what if you were developing for Summit? Do you want to rent supercomputer time when you're writing your code? Or do you test it out on a cheaper 4-core, $799 motherboard machine? https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/ https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
- classichasclass 8y ago
  I think the other advantage is the size. The EATX size of the T2 and T2 Lite is a bit bulky for some applications. We're actually thinking of sticking the 4-core Blackbird we ordered in the home theatre and using it for media as well as general computing. The mATX form factor just gives you much more flexibility.
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    Can you please share details about your HTPC build? What case will you be using? Did you choose Raptor's 2U heatsink assembly, their 3U HSF assembly, or something else?
- nine_k 8y ago
  You seem to be forgetting one of the key advantages of the platform: fully available and controllable source code, including firmware. For some applications, the compute performance is secondary to that, but price always plays a role. A moderately powerful workstation that runs 100% audited code is very desirable for some uses.
mwcampbell 8y ago
Can anyone recommend a 2U case that's known to work with this bundle and the 2U heatsink assembly? I'd prefer a short-depth case if possible.
- justinjlynn 8y ago
  I think that, when Raptor were demoing the blackbird at OpenPOWER Summit EU 2018, they were using a Lian-Li PC-05 case w/ the 2U HSF. You'd want to check with their sales/support for recommendations though. Edit: It was a Lian-Li PC-06SX and not an 05!
freekh 8y ago
For dev workflows the high-end 22 core with dual sockets seems to perform pretty well already: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-threadripper-core9&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t... Having such a powerful (or at least performant), free and risc-y machine has been a dream of mine for quite some time now... If I can only find a good argument to my wife as why we need one :P
- rdtsc 8y ago
  > high-end 22 core with dual sockets seems to perform pretty well already Oh nice! Almost 2x the speed of i9 for 7-Zip compression and ahead of everyone on LLVM compilation speed and Rust prime benchmarks.

155 points by pentestercrab 8y ago

a little bit disappointed that the motherboard only support up to 8 cores and actually comes with a 4 cores processor. such low core count is making the product not that attractive - I can go with µATX MB + Xeon if I want computing power or a decent 6/8-core ARM board for smaller form factor. to just try a different ISA, I'd probably choose RISC-V to maximize my potential investment return.

jlgaddis 8y ago
The same "bundle" with the 8-core POWER9 processor [0] is also available for pre-order. [0]: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html
gcb0 8y ago
this will give much more performance and compatibility than risc, at least if it ships soon I guess.
- Lio 8y ago
  The Power9, like all PowerPC chips, is a RISC based chip. Do you mean than RISC-V?
newnewpdro 8y ago
Considering you don't even mention the openness of the raptor products vs. the xeon alternative, you're not the target market.
- dis-sys 8y ago
  I'd be heading to RISC-V for openness.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    You can buy riscv in a year or 2 (for desktop), or wait 5 years for it to become performance competitive. Or you can buy power9 today (or end of 2019 for a cheaper model) and get a system that already exists, has silicon in production, and already appears to be performance competitive with Intel. Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first because I'm not necessarily in a place where I can justify the money even for an open platform, but let's not pretend that there are massive benefits to both.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      > Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first This is pretty much my threshold as well, but when I actually think about these numbers and put them in perspective with regards to how much I used to spend on 486/pentium desktop computers when they were modern, and adjust those numbers for inflation, it's downright absurd that I'm not willing to spend what raptorcs is asking for a modern, open platform, in 2018 dollars.
- 2sk21 8y ago
  This is really remarkable "you can audit and modify any portion of the open source firmware on the Blackbird™ mainboard, all the way down to the CPU microcode."
floatboth 8y ago
Or a 4-core ITX ARM board with almost[1] 100% open TianoCore UEFI firmware with ACPI and with x86 emulation for VBIOS [2] that allows video output from the EFI framebuffer… with a DIMM included… for a THIRD of the price of the Blackbird: https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/macchiatobin/ https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/macchiatobin... [1] one 12kb blob: https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/binaries-marvell/blob/binaries-marvell-armada-18.06/mrvl_scp_bl2_mss_ap_cp1_a8040.img https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/binaries-marvel... [2] https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platform/issues/2#issuecomment-385216950 https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf...
- tpearson-raptor 8y ago
  Not really blob free then, is it? ;-) Do you get full documentation of the processor internals and board schematics with that kit? How about an owner-controlled secure boot, or is that remaining blob vendor-locked / vendor signature controlled? The most pertinent point though is that the POWER9 will run circles around the ARM board in terms of performance, guaranteed. We're using the POWER9 as a full desktop replacement, ARM never really worked out in that role due to general performance issues / lagginess vs. the x86 boxes that were being replaced. A ~2GHz embedded ARM core isn't going to match up to a ~4GHz POWER core, at least not favorably -- you do get what you pay for! EDIT: On further comparison the Blackbird has double the SATA ports, double the SATA speed, two PCIe Gen 4 slots (a x16 and a x8) instead of a single Gen 3 x4, and quadruple the USB 3.0 ports. Really, the Blackbird is in a different class from that ARM system; it's competing against Intel and AMD boards, not against the low end ARM offerings.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    Of course 4GHz and PCIe x16 are very desirable, but $1000 for just the board+CPU bundle is waaaay too much if you just want to play with a non-x86 desktop. With AMD, you can fit a whole build (with an 8-core CPU, RAM, SSD and a good GPU) into $1000. Your mainboard is just ridiculously expensive. Yes, I understand that the volume is low and there was a lot of new R&D and whatnot… but it's still just a big PCB. What costs so much? Is PCIe gen 4 (that I don't need) contributing to the cost a lot?
amboar 8y ago
Bear in mind the P9 chip does SMT4, so four cores gives you 16 hardware threads, and 8 cores 32 threads etc.
dragontamer 8y ago
Power9 is one of the highest instructions-per-clock architectures in the world. Power9 just has relatively weak vector units: only 128-bit. (Even AMD Threadripper has support for 256-bit. Power9 128-bit is executed per super-slice, so its really 2x64-bit, to compare against AMD's 2x128-bit support) Otherwise, its throughput is downright insane. 6-issues per clock (Skylake only has 6 if its in the uOp cache: otherwise the decoder only pushes 4 uOps), 10MB of L3 per pair of cores. That's 20MB of L3 on the 4-core, and 110MB of L3 cache on the 22-core. ----- As far as price/performance goes, the 18-core / 72-thread chip seems best. But the 4-core / 16-thread or 8-core / 32-thread chips aren't bad, as far as I can tell. The main issue is that most compute-heavy code these days use those vector units (2x128 on AMD, 2x256 on Intel). But if you got a big GPU for SIMD / vectorized ops, then that disadvantage kinda goes away. GPUs are way fatter than Intel or AMD. The other issue is that AMD is offering cores at stupidly low prices. AMD Threadripper and EPYC are the machines to look at for raw CPU power these days. But I'd argue that the 18-core Power9 ($1,050) is at a good price/performance level. If you can find any application that benefits from the stupid-high 90MB of L3 cache on the 18-core, then you're more or less golden. I'd bet that databases love that L3 cache.
- dis-sys 8y ago
  thanks for the detailed info. phoronix.com just published some Power9 vs. Xeon vs Epyc benchmarks[1]. It is actually not on par with Xeon/Epyc. also note that the motherboard used by those Power9 has a price tag of $2499, when a dual socket LGA3647 motherboard from a first tier vendor can be purchased at $400 delivered. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-x86-servers&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-x...
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    A lot of the "weakness" there is due to the weak 4x64-bit vector units equipped on the Power9. Again: 4x64-bit vector units (Power9) simply has less throughput than 4x128-bit (EPYC) units, which has less throughput than 3x512-bit (Xeon Gold) vector units. On the few tests which don't have anything to do with vector units, Power9 does incredibly well. See 7-Zip Compression, Stockfish, Fhourstones, LLVM compiles. Power9 is very, very far ahead of the game here. When vector units (ie: OpenMP or intrinsics) are involved: such as Parboil, Gimp, x264, Rodinia, etc. etc. the Power9 does very poorly. ------------- Something else I've noticed: Power9 has a lot of latency behind its units: it is always 2-cycles or 3-cycles of latency (while EPYC or Skylake have many operations with 1-cycle of latency, like add or subtract). Power9 relies upon instruction-level parallelism to get things done. So there are a few cases like the Rust Mandelbrot benchmark, which surely hits that latency problem, while the Rustlang Prime benchmark shows off the ILP goodness the system offers.

KaiserPro 8y ago

How many threads per corse does it support? or is that a concept that doesn't apply to power9 procs?

tpearson-raptor 8y ago
All POWER products offer SMT. The POWER9 OpenPOWER chips are all 4 threads per core (SMT4), so a 4 core device presents 16 logical cores to the OS. POWER's hardware threading system is also unique and has high performance compared to offerings from other vendors (mainly x86) -- check out the processor user manual [1] for all the details. [1] https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/8/89/POWER9_um_OpenPOWER_v20GA_09APR2018_pub.pdf https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/8/89/POWER9_um_OpenPOWER_...
- dragontamer 8y ago
  > The POWER9 OpenPOWER chips are all 4 threads per core (SMT4) Some are SMT8. The ones that are supported by this motherboard are "only" SMT4 however. I think its "OpenPOWER" chips are at least 4-threads per core.
  - classichasclass 8y ago
    Cumulus are the SMT-8s. I think you're thinking of the PowerNV vs PowerVM distinction.

sliken 8y ago

So basically a quad CPU + motherboard for $1000. IBM doesn't seem confident enough in the performance of the power 9 to publish standard benchmarks like CPU2017. So if you want something with published scores on a wide variety of benchmarks that are included in CPU2017 get an Epyc or a Xeon.

tpearson-raptor 8y ago
Have you seen https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2018q3/cpu2017-20180805-08109.html https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2018q3/cpu2017-20180... from back in July? There are more submissions as well if you want to browse around a bit.
- sliken 8y ago
  I looked around on the floating point, and found none. There are some integer throughput results. Is the power9 only competitive for integer related workloads? E950 finds results on the Integer throughput list, but not the FP throughput list.
- sliken 8y ago
  Ah, looks like someone formatted the IBM entries incorrectly, at least unlike all the AMD and Intel entries I could find. Usually the description has a CPU entry something like "Intel Xeon Gold 6148". The IBM entries have things like "3.4 - 3.8 GHz, 40 core, SLES". So if you search any of the lists for "power9" you don't find anything.
- sliken 8y ago
  Phoronix just did a comparison. Power9 22 core, did well on 7zip, octave, and rust, but lost most of the benchmarks to the Xeon and Epyc dual sockets. Seems like Power9 does really well on interpreters.

profquail 8y ago

This is great! I’ve been hoping someone — IBM or one of it’s partners like Raptor or Gigabyte — would make a lower-end POWER8/9 system available. The price of this board ($1K) is much more affordable for a hobbyist developer who wants to tinker with POWER, try porting some open-source projects, etc.

microcolonel 8y ago
Yeah, this is what was exciting about the HiFive Unleashed: it's an actual Linux-capable RISC-V board with standard peripherals. The only downside is that it's about $4,000USD, all-told.
mrweasel 8y ago
The price is a little high, sadly. I don't blame them, it can't be that cheap to design and produce, and it really is what I would like to see as a desktop option. I mean it really sucks that we cry for non-X86 desktops, and when someone finally delivers, we complain about price. It's just little hard to justify for something I'd basically buy as a "toy".
- bradfa 8y ago
  The price isn't THAT high! Compare to an Intel 16 thread CPU + motherboard with ECC RAM and the ability to address more than 64GB of RAM. You're well into Xeon parts probably in the $300-400 range just for the CPU, then to get a decent motherboard is probably another $200. So you're paying a 2x premium for this Raptor Computing offering, that's really not THAT bad of pricing! This pricing is an order of magnitude better than some of the previous Raptor Computing POWER systems which will hopefully open up their market to a wider audience and help drive down prices in the future.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    That's true, I didn't really considered what the same money would buy me in x86 hardware. Still I think the point is that many of us would like something like a Power9 for our desktop, but we honestly don't need that level of hardware, so we hope for something around half price to justify buying what is essentially a luxury item.

LeonM 8y ago

From the specs: > 2 Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet ports > 1 Isolated BMC Gigabit Ethernet port What does 'isolated' mean in the context? AFAIK ethernet connections are always isolated using transformers, so I don't suppose they are talking about galvanic isolation here. Can anyone elaborate?

pabs3 8y ago
Some BMCs have the ability to listen on both the normal ports and the BMC-dedicated port (or just the sole normal port). Some do that all the time and some do that when the BMC-dedicated port isn't plugged in. I think this research was where I heard about this: https://lwn.net/Articles/630778/ https://lwn.net/Articles/630778/
- LeonM 8y ago
  Makes sense, thanks!
ZiiS 8y ago
They mean it is a separate physical conector. Some motherboards reuse an Ethernet port.
deelowe 8y ago
They don't mean electrically isolated. This means there is a dedicated ethernet port that's isolated to just the BMC (physically incapable of speaking to the IBM processor). It's a security feature.
stewart-ibm 8y ago
On many servers you can have a single physical ethernet port that works for both the service processor (BMC) and host processor. If you want someone to have access to only the host system and not the BMC then you place your trust in a bunch of hardware and firmware that does the sharing of the port. Having the port shared can save in cabling, but you trade that off for trusting some firmware to do the right thing. Isolated ports mean that you can have one cable that goes to the BMC and only the BMC, and one that goes to the host and only the host. i.e. you place trust for isolation in the fact that two cables go to two different places, and don't involve another bit of firmware.

kev009 8y ago

We have FreeBSD running with radeon driver and will have a ~linux4.20 amdgpu driver up by the time blackbird ships. Most the performance work is usable, our goal is to have a usable daily driver around Q1 https://github.com/POWER9BSD/freebsd https://github.com/POWER9BSD/freebsd

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
That's great, I've been hoping to see amdgpu support on FreeBSD. Thanks for your hard work!
equalunique 8y ago
This is fantastic news. I am glad this showed up as the top comment for me.

na85 8y ago

Anyone know when these are supposed to ship?

detaro 8y ago
from the page: > Expected to ship late Q1 2019

tareqak 8y ago

What is the space to the immediate right of the right RAM slot for? (https://static.rptorcs.com/BK1B01/images/boardlarge.png https://static.rptorcs.com/BK1B01/images/boardlarge.png) The white connector almost looks like an M.2 connector.

LeonM 8y ago
I've send an e-mail to Raptor about this (and the other connectors), I'll share if I get an answer
jandrese 8y ago
I don't think that's M.2, but I don't know what it is. It looks kind of like a hat connector of some kind. GPIO?
dragontamer 8y ago
I'm going to take a wild guess and say its an OCuLink connector. OCuLink can turn into M.2, U.2, or a variety of SATA connectors.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hlandau 8y ago
It's a connector for the optional FlexVer module they intend to release in the future. It's not OCuLink.
- LeonM 8y ago
  Thanks! More information on FlexVer: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexver_intro.pdf https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve... > FlexVer™ is a new, owner-controlled security technology designed to safeguard critical data and applications in the event of software or hardware tampering. FlexVer™ allows a system to be provisioned in a trusted physical environment, then deployed to an untrustworthy physical location while retaining system integrity.

ncmncm 8y ago

It doesn't seem to say anywhere what drives the HDMI output, just "2D". Is that just for connection to a PCI card? Or is there some rudimentary VESA frame-buffer chip on it, just to watch it boot?

MrRadar 8y ago
It has a server-style BMC which drives the HDMI port. It's only a basic 2D framebuffer device (with basic 3D "support" through the LLVMpipe OpenGL/Mesa software rasterizer), though Raptor Computer claims it's good enough for daily use. Obviously if you need high-performance 3D or more than 1 display you need would an add-in card.
- jandrese 8y ago
  You might run into problems with compositing window managers on that interface. Gnome supposedly has a pure-software fallback now, but it may be less than ideal. Most systems assume a minimal level of 3D acceleration support for desktop use. Watching video, browsing the web, etc... could suck down a lot more CPU than you're used to. NBD if you're using it as a server, but problematic as a daily driver desktop.
  - tpearson-raptor 8y ago
    For what it's worth, LLVMPipe normally picks up the basic 3D requirements without much trouble. When using Xorg though you definitely want to enable the 2D acceleration and disable Glamor; the chip is a fairly decent 2D framebuffer. On a slightly different topic, I'm not sure this push to force libre software into requiring a 3D GPU is a good idea while every 3D capable card / chip currently being made relies on proprietary firmware enforcing various forms of DRM. If at some point the already existing DRM starts being extended to protect modern 3D support (e.g consider no 4k /8k 3D allowed without DRM handshake), there is no reasonable fallback for the desktop (leaving games etc. aside); this is not a good place to be IMO.
stewart-ibm 8y ago
It'd be better to watch it boot over serial (which can also be done via SSH to the BMC) rather than this graphics port. the BMC chip (ast2500) has support for being a GPU for the host processor. It's a good old pretty dumb 2D framebuffer. Good for running an OS installer on. Because (currently, we're working on it) boot time is more than a couple of seconds before we could bring up a discrete GPU, this connector will get you boot progress (and let you see an error) that occurs before we could fire up a PCIe GPU.

dragontamer 8y ago

Hmmmm... the $1,129.99 for the "Lite" motherboard seems like a better value, especially because the "Lite" motherboard supports 22-core (88-thread) CPUs... or more importantly... the 18-core (72-thread) CPU, which seems like a good value. However, at $799 + 4-cores or 8-cores, the main purpose of this board is for "toy" uses. There's no way that the 4-core IBM is going to be anywhere as fast as a 16c/32t Threadripper 1950x (going for ~$450 these days btw), but it would be the cheapest machine to build for the Power9 system. So that alone is important. The "Basic" box would be for developer machines, while the "production" machine would be 22-core, or maybe 12-core SMT8 (the "thicker" IBM design where 8-SMT is possible). Consider this: what if you were developing for Summit? Do you want to rent supercomputer time when you're writing your code? Or do you test it out on a cheaper 4-core, $799 motherboard machine? https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/ https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/

classichasclass 8y ago
I think the other advantage is the size. The EATX size of the T2 and T2 Lite is a bit bulky for some applications. We're actually thinking of sticking the 4-core Blackbird we ordered in the home theatre and using it for media as well as general computing. The mATX form factor just gives you much more flexibility.
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  Can you please share details about your HTPC build? What case will you be using? Did you choose Raptor's 2U heatsink assembly, their 3U HSF assembly, or something else?
nine_k 8y ago
You seem to be forgetting one of the key advantages of the platform: fully available and controllable source code, including firmware. For some applications, the compute performance is secondary to that, but price always plays a role. A moderately powerful workstation that runs 100% audited code is very desirable for some uses.

mwcampbell 8y ago

Can anyone recommend a 2U case that's known to work with this bundle and the 2U heatsink assembly? I'd prefer a short-depth case if possible.

justinjlynn 8y ago
I think that, when Raptor were demoing the blackbird at OpenPOWER Summit EU 2018, they were using a Lian-Li PC-05 case w/ the 2U HSF. You'd want to check with their sales/support for recommendations though. Edit: It was a Lian-Li PC-06SX and not an 05!

freekh 8y ago

For dev workflows the high-end 22 core with dual sockets seems to perform pretty well already: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-threadripper-core9&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t... Having such a powerful (or at least performant), free and risc-y machine has been a dream of mine for quite some time now... If I can only find a good argument to my wife as why we need one :P

rdtsc 8y ago
> high-end 22 core with dual sockets seems to perform pretty well already Oh nice! Almost 2x the speed of i9 for 7-Zip compression and ahead of everyone on LLVM compilation speed and Rust prime benchmarks.