3 ms·

> POWER is extremely successful Compared to what? To the meteoric rise of x86 in the data center, and ARM in embedded, not enough it seems? And yes, currently

by jabl 7y ago

> POWER is extremely successful Compared to what? To the meteoric rise of x86 in the data center, and ARM in embedded, not enough it seems? And yes, currently the two largest supercomputers (Sierra & Summit) are POWER machines, but 1) Most of the oomph in those come from the Nvidia GPU's not the POWER cpu's 2) IBM got none of the CORAL-2 systems, which makes people wonder whether they have given up on the HPC market. If anything, it seems POWER is on a slow descent towards irrelevance. Considering the nice moves they have made wrt. openness (e.g. the Raptor machines with open firmware all the way down to the metal etc.), I hope I'm wrong and this move helps turn the ship around. We'll see I guess.

rbanffy 7y ago
POWER belongs to a niche. It's in the very profitable scale-up segment, above the x86 space, where x86s don't reach without some custom chipsets. The high end "reasonable" x86 boxes compete with the low end POWER machines and, from then on, almost nothing competes with them (it's a narrowing niche, I must add, and Oracle doesn't seem very interested in it). If IBM wants POWER to expand, it must do so down towards Intel and AMD. IIRC, the time Sierra and Summit got designed, POWER offered interconnects faster than anything available on x86, which was important to keep the GPUs in those systems busy. Different HPC systems have different needs and with the latest Xeon Scalable and AMD Rome that advantage may have evaporated a bit - and I'm not surprised IBM didn't win or even propose. Let's see what OpenCAPI and OMI bring to the table and if, with the good experiences with the Talos desktops as proof that the software ecosystem is there some foundry gets interested in something that could compete with lower end Xeon in the embedded space.

3 ms·

> POWER is extremely successful Compared to what? To the meteoric rise of x86 in the data center, and ARM in embedded, not enough it seems? And yes, currently

by jabl 7y ago

rbanffy 7y ago
POWER belongs to a niche. It's in the very profitable scale-up segment, above the x86 space, where x86s don't reach without some custom chipsets. The high end "reasonable" x86 boxes compete with the low end POWER machines and, from then on, almost nothing competes with them (it's a narrowing niche, I must add, and Oracle doesn't seem very interested in it). If IBM wants POWER to expand, it must do so down towards Intel and AMD. IIRC, the time Sierra and Summit got designed, POWER offered interconnects faster than anything available on x86, which was important to keep the GPUs in those systems busy. Different HPC systems have different needs and with the latest Xeon Scalable and AMD Rome that advantage may have evaporated a bit - and I'm not surprised IBM didn't win or even propose. Let's see what OpenCAPI and OMI bring to the table and if, with the good experiences with the Talos desktops as proof that the software ecosystem is there some foundry gets interested in something that could compete with lower end Xeon in the embedded space.