7 ms·

If only this had happened as Opteron was taking a beating in the server market. Now with EPYC Rome, I wonder just how many takers IBM will have.

by llampx 7y ago

ch_123 7y ago
I think the best bet for POWER would be for Chinese manufacturers, given the trade war and general distrust of American-made tech in their systems. There are already manufacturers who have licensed the EPYC IP from AMD, but a for-free design could be compelling.
- ryacko 7y ago
  AMD uses TSMC’s process, so PowerPC could end competing with x86 for Western consumers as well.
vasilia 7y ago
Power clusters are used for ML because they have integrated NVLink and as I remember OpenCApi for FPGA. It’s not general purpose platform.
- classichasclass 7y ago
  I'm typing this reply to you on one (in Firefox 68). What's not general purpose about it?
  - vasilia 7y ago
    From Power9 cluster with array of GPUs? For work loads like http servers/php code/MySQL/etc intel CPU will be much faster. We have CPU samples from all vendors, unfortunately Intel right now is the best platform.
    - classichasclass 7y ago
      That didn't answer my question. That's fine if you think Intel is better (I don't, but that's orthogonal), but that doesn't make PowerPC less general purpose.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
brianwawok 7y ago
There seem to be general paths for OS. 1) OS from the start. Develop in the open. Maybe lock some features behind a paywall. 2) OS when something is not hot anymore. Take your formerly private stuff you charged a lot of money for, and because so much better stuff has come out.. meh, let's OS it. This is clearly a case of #2....
- ch_123 7y ago
  While I agree that there's a whiff of IBM trying to offload responsibility for older tech, I think some credit has to be given to projects which pre-dated the current industry attitudes towards open source. A lot of things had to happen (probably including people of a certain generation/era passing the torch) before companies felt comfortable with the idea that they could open source their tech, and still have a competitive advantage over anyone else who would use it. In the late 80s/early 90s when POWER appeared, and RISC fever was in full swing, if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least.
  - StillBored 7y ago
    > if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least. Well that was basically the PPC consortium. I'm not sure how much apple/motorola/etc paid to be part of it, but the idea was to build a common ISA from multiple vendors.
- floatboth 7y ago
  Hardware is different than software though: producing actual physical chips is extremely expensive. POWER is hot, IBM is probably just confident that someone else producing competing compatible chips and taking all their customers is not a real threat / completely outweighed by the benefits of an open ecosystem (including more compatible but different segment (low-power) chips)
mshook 7y ago
Yeah, it's the question I guess: too little, too late? Because it's hard to beat the x86 mammoth for so many reasons (on top of my head): - huge market share in servers/workstations - Intel has more resources than pretty much anyone else - AMD is now back in the game and started a core/performance/price war with intel - x86 is "cheap" - market shares for "cheaper" stuff will probably be taken by ARM and RISC-V - so much time was invested in optimizing compiler, code and so on for x86 because that's what everyone has - the Torvalds argument which is to say developper "will happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better,". So as long as you don't have cheap Power workstations, it'll be a moot point. I remember working on AlphaPC and pretty much nothing was 64 bits clean back then, it was a huge mess. Now that part is solved but not everything else... I definitely get the appeal for the Googles of the world to challenge Intel and for niche (internal) products, and for myself because honestly I don't really need an intel compatible CPU but in the long run, I am not sure it'll go anywhere...
- floatboth 7y ago
  > the Torvalds argument Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud… but both of those are really expensive, so instead I have a MACCHIATObin at home & AWS Graviton in the cloud. ARM is winning :P > optimizing compiler, code and so on Fun fact, IBM is paying large amounts of cash on BountySource for SIMD optimizations of various things for POWER: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm But ARM is winning again: many things, especially the more user-facing ones, are already optimized thanks to smartphones. For POWER, the TenFourFox author is I think still working on SpiderMonkey's baseline JIT. For ARM (AArch64), IonMonkey (full smart JIT) is already enabled, developed by Mozilla, thanks to both Android phones and the new Windows-Qualcomm laptops: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536220 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536220
  - mshook 7y ago
    > Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud… Yeah but there's a HUGE but: the motherboard and CPU (1S/4C/16T) and heatsink alone are $1.4k, no RAM no case no HD no nothing (I found a guy who spec'ed one for $2.1k with everything you'd need for a reasonable workstation). So unless you have a massive good reason or interest (political, because POWER, your company runs on POWER, "f*ck" x86, ...) to run your code on POWER, I don't see why you'd spend that much while you could get better for a lot less. And the only way it'll get cheaper is to mass produce it: let's be realistic, as much as I'd want to have a POWER workstation or laptop (hey, there were SPARC and Thinkpad PowerPC laptops so why not), I won't be holding my breath while I wait...
marcthe12 7y ago
The funny thing is that IBM caused x86 to be successful due to the IBM PC
- skissane 7y ago
  It's entirely possible that the x86 might still have been very successful even if the IBM PC had never happened. Back then, there were a lot of vendors involved in the 8080/Z80 ecosystem, and the 8086/8088 was a logical path to the future for those vendors – an easier migration path than e.g. the Motorola 68K, and cheaper than the 68K as well.
  - FullyFunctional 7y ago
    I was an active Z-80 user in those days and I respectfully disagree with that assessment. There was nothing logical about going from Z-80 to 8088/86 (and 8080 didn't matter nearly as much). Seeing the number of design wins m68k racked up, it would have been the logical choice (and ISTR that IBM actually liked it better, but it and its peripherals were more expensive). Disclaimer: not a fan of any of these architectures. EDIT: typo

If only this had happened as Opteron was taking a beating in the server market. Now with EPYC Rome, I wonder just how many takers IBM will have.

by llampx 7y ago

If only this had happened as Opteron was taking a beating in the server market. Now with EPYC Rome, I wonder just how many takers IBM will have.

ch_123 7y ago

I think the best bet for POWER would be for Chinese manufacturers, given the trade war and general distrust of American-made tech in their systems. There are already manufacturers who have licensed the EPYC IP from AMD, but a for-free design could be compelling.

ryacko 7y ago
AMD uses TSMC’s process, so PowerPC could end competing with x86 for Western consumers as well.

vasilia 7y ago

Power clusters are used for ML because they have integrated NVLink and as I remember OpenCApi for FPGA. It’s not general purpose platform.

classichasclass 7y ago
I'm typing this reply to you on one (in Firefox 68). What's not general purpose about it?
- vasilia 7y ago
  From Power9 cluster with array of GPUs? For work loads like http servers/php code/MySQL/etc intel CPU will be much faster. We have CPU samples from all vendors, unfortunately Intel right now is the best platform.
  - classichasclass 7y ago
    That didn't answer my question. That's fine if you think Intel is better (I don't, but that's orthogonal), but that doesn't make PowerPC less general purpose.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

brianwawok 7y ago

There seem to be general paths for OS. 1) OS from the start. Develop in the open. Maybe lock some features behind a paywall. 2) OS when something is not hot anymore. Take your formerly private stuff you charged a lot of money for, and because so much better stuff has come out.. meh, let's OS it. This is clearly a case of #2....

ch_123 7y ago
While I agree that there's a whiff of IBM trying to offload responsibility for older tech, I think some credit has to be given to projects which pre-dated the current industry attitudes towards open source. A lot of things had to happen (probably including people of a certain generation/era passing the torch) before companies felt comfortable with the idea that they could open source their tech, and still have a competitive advantage over anyone else who would use it. In the late 80s/early 90s when POWER appeared, and RISC fever was in full swing, if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least.
- StillBored 7y ago
  > if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least. Well that was basically the PPC consortium. I'm not sure how much apple/motorola/etc paid to be part of it, but the idea was to build a common ISA from multiple vendors.
floatboth 7y ago
Hardware is different than software though: producing actual physical chips is extremely expensive. POWER is hot, IBM is probably just confident that someone else producing competing compatible chips and taking all their customers is not a real threat / completely outweighed by the benefits of an open ecosystem (including more compatible but different segment (low-power) chips)

mshook 7y ago

Yeah, it's the question I guess: too little, too late? Because it's hard to beat the x86 mammoth for so many reasons (on top of my head): - huge market share in servers/workstations - Intel has more resources than pretty much anyone else - AMD is now back in the game and started a core/performance/price war with intel - x86 is "cheap" - market shares for "cheaper" stuff will probably be taken by ARM and RISC-V - so much time was invested in optimizing compiler, code and so on for x86 because that's what everyone has - the Torvalds argument which is to say developper "will happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better,". So as long as you don't have cheap Power workstations, it'll be a moot point. I remember working on AlphaPC and pretty much nothing was 64 bits clean back then, it was a huge mess. Now that part is solved but not everything else... I definitely get the appeal for the Googles of the world to challenge Intel and for niche (internal) products, and for myself because honestly I don't really need an intel compatible CPU but in the long run, I am not sure it'll go anywhere...

floatboth 7y ago
> the Torvalds argument Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud… but both of those are really expensive, so instead I have a MACCHIATObin at home & AWS Graviton in the cloud. ARM is winning :P > optimizing compiler, code and so on Fun fact, IBM is paying large amounts of cash on BountySource for SIMD optimizations of various things for POWER: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm But ARM is winning again: many things, especially the more user-facing ones, are already optimized thanks to smartphones. For POWER, the TenFourFox author is I think still working on SpiderMonkey's baseline JIT. For ARM (AArch64), IonMonkey (full smart JIT) is already enabled, developed by Mozilla, thanks to both Android phones and the new Windows-Qualcomm laptops: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536220 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536220
- mshook 7y ago
  > Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud… Yeah but there's a HUGE but: the motherboard and CPU (1S/4C/16T) and heatsink alone are $1.4k, no RAM no case no HD no nothing (I found a guy who spec'ed one for $2.1k with everything you'd need for a reasonable workstation). So unless you have a massive good reason or interest (political, because POWER, your company runs on POWER, "f*ck" x86, ...) to run your code on POWER, I don't see why you'd spend that much while you could get better for a lot less. And the only way it'll get cheaper is to mass produce it: let's be realistic, as much as I'd want to have a POWER workstation or laptop (hey, there were SPARC and Thinkpad PowerPC laptops so why not), I won't be holding my breath while I wait...

marcthe12 7y ago

The funny thing is that IBM caused x86 to be successful due to the IBM PC

skissane 7y ago
It's entirely possible that the x86 might still have been very successful even if the IBM PC had never happened. Back then, there were a lot of vendors involved in the 8080/Z80 ecosystem, and the 8086/8088 was a logical path to the future for those vendors – an easier migration path than e.g. the Motorola 68K, and cheaper than the 68K as well.
- FullyFunctional 7y ago
  I was an active Z-80 user in those days and I respectfully disagree with that assessment. There was nothing logical about going from Z-80 to 8088/86 (and 8080 didn't matter nearly as much). Seeing the number of design wins m68k racked up, it would have been the logical choice (and ISTR that IBM actually liked it better, but it and its peripherals were more expensive). Disclaimer: not a fan of any of these architectures. EDIT: typo