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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 produc

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.

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.