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> An open, high end CPU design is really going to change the cloud market. I agree. It's only that POWER does not appear to be very high end to me. At best it

• tpearson-raptor 7y ago
  As a cloud services consumer, what guarantee (financial, legal, indemnification) will you grant me that your systems will not leak or otherwise tamper with my data, given that you use machines that I know for a fact you have no control over and have not audited prior to the handoff from UEFI to the hypervisor/OS? For that matter how have you mitigated the persistent x86 rogue DMA problem? POWER9 still has two advantages -- security and speed. Yes, speed -- the core is quite weak on some tasks and very strong on others. If you're buying this to primarily run an AVX intensive type workload, don't (unless you need the security aspects). Those massively wide, vector dependent workloads aren't exactly common in multitenant cloud though, unless you're using GPU offload where POWER again beats even the newest AMD chips for pure GPU offload performance. So much for the good...the ugly is that POWER9 was fundamentally late and not at performance levels we wanted, but that's a transient state. Every CPU vendor puts a chip like that out from time to time, and IBM is acutely aware of the problems here. I see no reason to go to an even more problematic architectures (x86 duopoly with master vendor keys, RISC-V with fragmentation and weak cores / immature toolchains) when we now have a better option available.