4 ms·

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

by 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...
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Yeah, I already mentioned that because of that price, my "fuck x86" machine is ARMv8 :) (okay, not only because of the price, also because I just like the A64 ISA and UEFI) The SolidRun MACCHIATObin is not nearly as powerful — it's ultrabook-grade performance, not server-grade — but it works fine for coding & browsing, and it's also quite open — the only blob in the firmware is something tiny and irrelevant (and I'm pretty sure for some secondary processor), everything on the ARM cores post-ROM (including RAM training code) I have built from source.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    That's more expensive than an x86 equivalent system, but hardly outrageously more so.
    - floatboth 7y ago
      Well, the CPUs are in the same ballpark (<500 bucks for the 4-core POWER9 ~= launch price of the Ryzen 7 1800X) but the boards are outrageous — $1100 for the Blackbird is almost twice as expensive as ridiculous E X T R E M E boards like the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME for Threadripper (and a normal decent board for desktop Ryzen is in the $250 area). Yeah, it's low volume and Raptor needs to pay their employees — but $1100 for a mainboard? Come on. Maybe they should have dropped PCIe Gen 4 from the Blackbird at least.
- classichasclass 7y ago
  Yeah, I'm still working on it. But I'm just one guy. Hopefully this gains interest from others in working on it too (and I will _not_ be butthurt if someone gets a fully functional one submitted before I do -- in fact, I'll probably be relieved). https://github.com/classilla/jitpower https://github.com/classilla/jitpower
- stochastic_monk 7y ago
  POWER9 only supports 128-bit vectors, which is a big disadvantage.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Yeah, Intel is ahead of everyone in SIMD width (until someone makes a chip with like 2048-bit ARM SVE :D). But still, that didn't prevent POWER9 from being in one of the largest supercomputers. And super wide SIMD has its disadvantages (hello AVX Offset downclocking)
    - mshook 7y ago
      You have a point but then Intel has been crushing it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP... They have cornered at least 85% of that market... And most likely, it's the nVidia connection with NVLink which matters most in there if we talk about SIMD... They said it better than I could (in June of 2018): https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-accelerated-supercomputers-change-the-balance-of-power-on-the-top500/ https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-accelerated-supercompute... In the latest TOP500 rankings announced this week, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running in new supercomputers – that according to the Nvidians, who enjoy keeping track of such things. In this case, most of those additional flops came from three top systems new to the list: Summit, Sierra, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI). Summit, the new TOP500 champ, pushed the previous number one system, the 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight, into second place with a Linpack score of 122.3 petaflops. Summit is powered by IBM servers, each one equipped with two Power9 CPUs and six V100 GPUs. According to NVIDIA, 95 percent of the Summit’s peak performance (187.7 petaflops) is derived from the system’s 27,686 GPUs. (emphasis mine, Summit being a POWER9 supercomputer with 4608 nodes with 2 POWER9 and 6 V100 in each)
      - classichasclass 7y ago
        I think that's more reflective of Intel cornering at least 85% of virtually every market (except, notoriously, mobile) than of some special suitability for HPC.

by mshook 7y ago

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...
- floatboth 7y ago
  Yeah, I already mentioned that because of that price, my "fuck x86" machine is ARMv8 :) (okay, not only because of the price, also because I just like the A64 ISA and UEFI) The SolidRun MACCHIATObin is not nearly as powerful — it's ultrabook-grade performance, not server-grade — but it works fine for coding & browsing, and it's also quite open — the only blob in the firmware is something tiny and irrelevant (and I'm pretty sure for some secondary processor), everything on the ARM cores post-ROM (including RAM training code) I have built from source.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  That's more expensive than an x86 equivalent system, but hardly outrageously more so.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Well, the CPUs are in the same ballpark (<500 bucks for the 4-core POWER9 ~= launch price of the Ryzen 7 1800X) but the boards are outrageous — $1100 for the Blackbird is almost twice as expensive as ridiculous E X T R E M E boards like the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME for Threadripper (and a normal decent board for desktop Ryzen is in the $250 area). Yeah, it's low volume and Raptor needs to pay their employees — but $1100 for a mainboard? Come on. Maybe they should have dropped PCIe Gen 4 from the Blackbird at least.
classichasclass 7y ago
Yeah, I'm still working on it. But I'm just one guy. Hopefully this gains interest from others in working on it too (and I will _not_ be butthurt if someone gets a fully functional one submitted before I do -- in fact, I'll probably be relieved). https://github.com/classilla/jitpower https://github.com/classilla/jitpower
stochastic_monk 7y ago
POWER9 only supports 128-bit vectors, which is a big disadvantage.
- floatboth 7y ago
  Yeah, Intel is ahead of everyone in SIMD width (until someone makes a chip with like 2048-bit ARM SVE :D). But still, that didn't prevent POWER9 from being in one of the largest supercomputers. And super wide SIMD has its disadvantages (hello AVX Offset downclocking)
  - mshook 7y ago
    You have a point but then Intel has been crushing it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP... They have cornered at least 85% of that market... And most likely, it's the nVidia connection with NVLink which matters most in there if we talk about SIMD... They said it better than I could (in June of 2018): https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-accelerated-supercomputers-change-the-balance-of-power-on-the-top500/ https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-accelerated-supercompute... In the latest TOP500 rankings announced this week, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running in new supercomputers – that according to the Nvidians, who enjoy keeping track of such things. In this case, most of those additional flops came from three top systems new to the list: Summit, Sierra, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI). Summit, the new TOP500 champ, pushed the previous number one system, the 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight, into second place with a Linpack score of 122.3 petaflops. Summit is powered by IBM servers, each one equipped with two Power9 CPUs and six V100 GPUs. According to NVIDIA, 95 percent of the Summit’s peak performance (187.7 petaflops) is derived from the system’s 27,686 GPUs. (emphasis mine, Summit being a POWER9 supercomputer with 4608 nodes with 2 POWER9 and 6 V100 in each)
    - classichasclass 7y ago
      I think that's more reflective of Intel cornering at least 85% of virtually every market (except, notoriously, mobile) than of some special suitability for HPC.