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Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor
- supernova87a 6y agoFor the uninitiated, what's the value prop of these processors? Cheaper $ cost per TFLOPs to make up for the trouble of dealing with a specialty instruction set? Speed of certain specialized computations that cannot be matched by alternatives? Or how would one summarize it?
- qubex 6y agoOpen Architecture with no black boxes. Total control over your system of the kind we used to take for granted before the Intel Management Architecture days. Very focussed on throughput and centralised operation (for example homomorphic encryption and encrypted memory to forestall snooping). And yes, when used ‘correctly’, these systems can be very fast... in the steady marathon kind of way rather than the spasmodic sprint-racer clock-boosting-and-throttling manner of today’s mainline chips.
- oblio 6y ago> Open Architecture with no black boxes. How do you reconcile this comment with the one from reacharavindh? What use is the "Open Architecture" part if they're super expensive (ok, maybe you can ignore this part) and you have to go through sales representatives for a simple sale? Those are still barriers to entry, even if they're not technical.
- qubex 6y agoI don’t even attempt to reconcile it because they’re totally different things... ‘Open’ means that you’re allowed to understand exactly how it works and that there’s no mysteries. It means having the blueprints of the machine, not a free machine.
- oblio 6y agoYeah, but "Open" isn't everything. 1. Is any of these "Open" architectures actually used in production anywhere serious when not implemented by their creators? I'm actually interested to know of examples. 2. How do we know that the actual chip IBM provides is the thing in the spec? The comparison was with Intel, how can we prove that there are no backdoors for PowerPC? If we can't prove, does it matter if it's "Open"?
- qubex 6y ago> but “Open” isn’t everything I never claimed it was, and this is starting to reek of a straw-man argument where you’re opposing a statement I haven’t actually made. (1) Yes, I am aware of situations where this architecture has been chosen by a body that isn’t a chief implementor, and no, I am not at liberty to discuss it. (2) Having an open spec to compare against, even though I actually don’t know how, is already another plane of existence compared to not having something to compare against. Decapping and microscopy? Pushing edge cases onto the chip and comparing expected outputs? Implementing all or part on an FPGA and seeing how they compare at a severely clock-reduced rate? It’s well beyond my technical ability, but it’s not beyond expert technicians’ abilities. That’s the key point. EDIT: Also you can set your own keys for the root trust, and remove others’. That’s very important, and radically orthogonal to the competition of ARM and x86₆₄.
- fluffything 6y ago> Open Architecture with no black boxes. > ‘Open’ means that you’re allowed to understand exactly how it works and that there’s no mysteries. It means having the blueprints of the machine, not a free machine. No, this is 100% incorrect. The Power ISA, i.e., the software/hardware interface of the CPU, is open source. This means that if you want to build a Power CPU that implements its software interface, you can do so "for free". That's it. You don't get "the blueprints of the machine", you cannot look into how the CPU work internally and understand it, etc. That's like having a standard API that anybody can implement, e.g., the C standard library, but which Apple, Microsoft, etc. ship as a black box binary blob, so you can't understand their implementation, search/fix bugs, etc. So no, your claim is completely incorrect. The benefits of an open ISA only apply to those wanting to build their own CPUs, which for Power is just not even a handful of companies, none of them making their blueprints of their CPUs openly available... For end users, your machine is as open/closed on a system with an open ISA like in one with a closed one. People paying 10k$ for a Raptor II in the name of openness are throwing their money away. This is a completely different situation than, e.g., RISC-V, where not only the ISA is open-source, but the VHDL implementation of many RISC-V cores is also open source, and you can buy those cores today.
- softwarejosh 6y agoYeah, check out powerpc laptop project. Some folks are trying to build a laptop with powerpc.
- duskwuff 6y agoIt's a doomed project. There are no mobile PowerPC parts on the market anymore; they're trying to make do with a QorIQ networking part, which has an inappropriate power budget for a laptop. (The specifications are a little hazy on the matter, but by my reading of the datasheet, it idles around 7W and draws closer to 20W at full power.)
- gnufx 6y agoIt's not about the ISA (I assume). The point is that these systems have essentially all free software firmware, as I understand it. You have remote management, but it's something you can presumably fix if you need to. Apart from trust issues, you know how valuable that is if, for instance, you've had to deal with BMCs' brokenness continually over the years.
- zvrba 6y agoSo how come all the spotlights are on RISC-V? Another case of "worse is better"?
- 0xcde4c3db 6y agoAs far as I know, Power ISA implementations still required royalties until a year ago, so it hasn't had much time to mature in the current iteration of its "open" role.
- sradman 6y agoSince selling its Intel server business to Lenovo, IBM enterprise server hardware is Power only. It is the flip side to some of the complaints in this thread, IBM enterprise sales is the single trusted source (or single throat to choke) for all of your business critical systems. If your organization has an existing relationship with IBM or Red Hat, Power CPUs are part of an integrated bundle moving forward.
- arnon 6y agoThey also have NVLink which means 9x more bandwidth to NVIDIA GPUs compared to PCIe 3.0x16
- dragontamer 6y agoThey seem to be the best "communicators" on the market. With 1TB DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support, a POWER10 will be the fastest "glue" between DDR5 and GPUs. Which is pretty much how it works in the Summit supercomputer (POWER9). -------- From a CPU-perspective, its going to be more costly than a Xeon or EPYC and not as fast at crunching numbers. But POWER9 (and I expect POWER10) usually had the best L3 cache and RAM performance. The 1TB/sec OpenCAPI link to FPGAs or GPUs continues that tradition. That's an absurdly huge communication path between CPUs and/or GPUs or whatever else is on the motherboard.
- sbierwagen 6y agoVertical scaling for database servers.
- ckastner 6y agoIt's interesting to see that they are using Samsung's 7nm process. I thought that, apart from the work they do for Apple, Samsung kept their high-end fabbing mostly to themselves.
- tpetry 6y agoOne of the many core business of samsung is fabbing on request. They are not doing this only for their smartphones and a few exceptions.
- ckastner 6y agoFor the their most advanced process, too? I wonder because NVIDIA, AMD and others requiring that process all seem to land at TSMC. Qualcomm, too, but that's hardly surprising.
- hocuspocus 6y agoQualcomm is currently using Samsung's 7 nm and nVidia will too.
- ckastner 6y agoSo I'm far off on both counts. Thank you for the correction.
- tooltalk 6y agoSamsung, Glofo and IBM were members of the Common Platform. My ex-roommate used to work at IBM Upstate where they trained Samsung engineers. Apple moved to TSMC in Taiwan not too long after Tim Cook appeared on CBS claiming that the engines of their mobile devices were made in US, almost 6-7 years ago. Apple's share of Samsung's production isn't probably much these days. But they are still #2 behind TSMC and Samsung also announced recently that they are investing $100B for next 10 years in logic business which includes their foundry.
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- deugtniet 6y agoOur institution runs multiple HPC clusters for all kinds of scientific use cases. I remember reading about the head of the HPC department making the switch from INTEL/AMD to IBM because it had a much larger memory / storage (I can't remember which) bandwidth in some astronomy application. This made the project feasible without having to invest in custom hardware. It's good to see that POWER still excels in important use cases.
- gnufx 6y agoPOWER9 has large cache and can take large memory (at least for when it appeared), but was particularly notable for bandwidth/latency. I think they were the first with PCIe 4, for instance, when PCIe 3 was a bottleneck for HPC interconnect. The native interconnect in 10 looks interesting.
- peter303 6y ago36% of Supercomputer 500 list use IBM power CPUs, including top two supercomputers. https://www.top500.org/ https://www.top500.org/
- willvarfar 6y agoJapan's Fugaku with Fujitsu Spark CPUs has just taken the crown. IBM Power CPUs are now 2nd and 3rd. https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2020/06/ https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2020/06/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujitsu_A64FX
- eqvinox 6y agoThat's an ARM(v8.2-A) chip, not SPARC. Also, SPARC is spelled SPARC.
- DonHopkins 6y agoAnd SPARC spelled backwards is CRAPS.
- fancyfredbot 6y agoIs there a more informative writeup somewhere? I couldn't find any data on performance outside AI inference workloads. There is a footnote about 30 cores but very little detail even on that.
- mbrobbel 6y agoHere are some slides: https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/17/ibm_power10_summary.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/17/ibm_power10_summary.pdf
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- totetsu 6y agoWhat do they do with the edge bits of the silicon wafer that are not squares?
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI'm not sure if they can be 'just' recycled into new wafers. Either way, given that it's just silicon I'm sure it can be recycled or safely disposed of (silicon isn't toxic as far as I know, unless you breathe it in a powder form)
- MayeulC 6y agoNot sure how easy it would be to recycle those as chips, given it will have dopants [1] inside. It will likely be unfit for computing applications unless purified, but since it's on the order of one dopant atom per 1e12 silicon atoms, it would basically be 100% pure in other industries. Some metallic contacts (mostly aluminium), silicon oxide and other residues are likely present as well, depending on the masking process. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_(semiconductor)#Silicon_dopants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_(semiconductor)#Silicon...
- Keyframe 6y agoThere's stuff deposited on top. Depending on the stage, it's not silicon only.
- elihu 6y agoI'm not an expert in this stuff, but I think they just get thrown away. It's one of several reasons why smaller chips are more area-efficient to make, and one of several reasons why the major semiconductor manufacturers have been so interested lately in building chips out of smaller pieces manufactured separately rather than one big monolithic chip.
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- reacharavindh 6y agoIt’s very cool, but unfortunately inaccessible for those without sky high budgets and time to talk to sales reps. I would happily experiment with one of these at our HPC cluster(a small group at an University), but the idea of talking to a sales rep to even figure out what it would cost puts me off completely, ignoring the licenses for most interesting things to do with the hardware you buy. I wish t. power boxes were as easy to buy as x86 boxes. Simply configure, get an idea of a price, talk to the distributor and place an order.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI don't know if it's accessible to everyone, but IBM does have a cloud offering: https://www.ibm.com/cloud https://www.ibm.com/cloud. Their bare metal offering doesn't seem to include Power processors though: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers
- guerrilla 6y agoDo you know about Raptor Computing? [1] Some of those are affordable and all of them are configurable. Maybe they'll support POWER10 in the future. [1]. https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/
- qubex 6y agoRaptor Systems’s POWER9-based Talos system immediately came to mind when I was reading this. I definitely hope they’ll be bringing out a POWER10-supporting successor. The experience is now pretty perfect, even for the supposedly dicey desktop environment (provided you keep in mind that there’s a lot less hardware present than you might’ve come to expect: no integrated graphics, no in-built sound, even disk and network controllers can be a bit dicey). Their initial offerings had some notable teething problems, that I shan’t waste more pixels going into (I’ve railed against them and turned in their favour, so I shall let it rest with my partisanship and convert’s fervour). It’s certainly worth considering if you’re into exotic hardware and/or are super-security conscious AND are willing to pay some extra money beyond what you’d expect for comparable x86₆₄ commodity builds. Well worth hoping for and looking into.
- person_of_color 6y agoNice. Where are the main HPC jobs located?
- birdyrooster 6y agoNational Labs in US
- ognyankulev 6y agoIs IBM POWER the modern day Cray?
- unixhero 6y agoA little bit recursive perhaps. But; IBM is modern day IBM.
- SwimSwimHungry 6y agoNow if I can get one of these puppies in a future Raptor Computing build... That would be the dream.
- filereaper 6y agoHave they improved Load-Hit-Store penalties from previous generations? Lots of transistors and opcodes have been sacrificed for fancy things like transactional memory, runtime instrumentation and other features but fundamentals haven't improved requiring expensive compiler opts which interpreters don't do and are expensive for JITs. The Intel chips did the fundamentals better, has POWER caught up?
- staticelf 6y agoLooks cool, but seems to be pretty unavailable unless you're a large business. Also, very weird that they write about themselves in third person.
- moonchild 6y ago> transparent memory encryption designed to support end-to-end security Does this work with process isolation? I.E. can I make it so that each process's memory is encrypted with a different key, to prevent snooping by other processes? How (if at all) does that work with debuggers?
- jiggawatts 6y agoI'm not sure about POWER, but in AMD EPYC it is implemented at the hypervisor level. So each VM can have encrypted memory with a unique key, but within a VM the processes see unencrypted memory. It's typically implemented as an extension of the virtual memory page table, and conceptually it wouldn't be too difficult to have finer-grained keys, such as one for the kernel and one for user mode processes, or even one per process.
- moonchild 6y agoInteresting. Does that allay the concerns about speculative execution side channel leaks in cloud VMs? (Because even if you can leak data from other VMs running on the same physical device, that data will be garbage without the other VM's encryption key.)
- gnufx 6y agoI noticed recently that OpenBLAS has gained some code using the POWER 10 matrix-multiplication units: https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/tree/develop/kernel/power https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/tree/develop/kernel/power
- hestefisk 6y agoImagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
- fancyfredbot 6y agoMy take on performance using the slides mbrobbel posted, from https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/17/ibm_power10_summary.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/17/ibm_power10_summary.pdf The dual chip module has 30 SMT8 cores running at 3+GHz, capable of 64 FP64 FLOPS/cycle when using the matrix unit. That gives 5.7TF of peak FP64 performance (Compared to 19.5TF on NVIDIA A100 when using tensor cores, and 9.7TF on A100 when not using tensor cores). They say it has 3x the "general purpose socket performance" of power9 in FP workloads. Trying to make sense of this from the other data, they have 15 SMT8 cores per chip (12 on Power9). The single chip module runs at "4+"GHz and dual chip at "3+"Ghz. (4GHz on Power9). Each SMT8 core has 30% additional performance compared to Power9 (slide 13). If I assume the lowest possible clock that gets me to 2.4x comparing the dual chip modules to the previous single chip modules, whereas assuming 3.75GHz clocks would give 3x.
- jp0d 6y agoI used to work on an IBM AIX system as a data warehouse developer. That was on Power architecture but unfortunately I didn't know much about this architecture back then.
- nullifidian 6y agoConsidering the performance of Power9, it's likely to be slower than the modern x86 cpus, with some specialized exceptions.
- Something1234 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24184786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24184786
- tikej 6y agoI had really high hopes for cpu with native float128 support (quad precision) with POWER9 but after tests it turned out is only native in addition and multiplication ops. We’ll see what new generation brings to the table.
- SSLy 6y agoAddition and multiplication ops are the stark majority.
- stevespang 6y agoSamsung fabbed this chip
- jiggawatts 6y agoThere's some great info in these slides: https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/17/ibm_power10_summary.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/17/ibm_power10_summary.pdf - They leapfrogged everyone else with PCIe v5 and DDR5 - 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, which is comparable to high-end NVIDIA GPUs, but for CPUs - Socket-to-socket interconnect is 1 TB/s also. - 120 GB/s/core L3 cache read rate sustained. - Floating point rate comparable to GPUs - 8-way SMT makes this into a hybrid between a CPU and a GPU in terms of the latency hiding and memory management, but programmable exactly like a full CPU, without the limitations of a GPU. - Memory disaggregation similar to how most modern enterprise architectures separate disk from compute. You can have memory-less compute nodes talking to a central memory node! - 16-socket glueless servers - Has instructions for accelerating gzip.
- baybal2 6y agoIt leaves me salivating
- gnufx 6y ago> - Floating point rate comparable to GPUs Where do you get the FP performance, exactly, and for what value of "FP"? It's unclear to me in the slides from El Reg, which appear to be about the MMA specifically, and it's not clear what the SIMD units actually are. (I don't know if that's specified by the ISA.) One thing is that it presumably has a better chance of keeping the SIMD fed than some.
- predicating 6y agoWill they still be ahead when this actually releases in 2H21?
- burtonator 6y ago> - Has instructions for accelerating gzip. Has there been any research for finding out how much these custom instructions have accelerated modern computational power in practice? There are a lot of these instructions in modern CPUs for AES, gzip, SSL, etc but you have to have a library coded to support them. I'm curious what the performance improvements look like in practice.
- sys_64738 6y agoIs anybody buying non-ARM/non-x86 systems nowadays? Seems like a dying market.
- Kaytaro 6y agoYes, the financial sector loves them.
- fortran77 6y agoAny chance Apple will return to POWER CPUs and be a real "supercomputer" again? https://jeffhendricks.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/PowermacG4.jpg https://jeffhendricks.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Powerma...
- EricE 6y agoHa! I wouldn't hold my breath - indeed they are ramping up to use their own system on chips (SoC) - not just CPUs - in future Macs. If they deliver a significant increase in performance - even if it's only for a few specific use cases - the ripples will be interesting to watch play out for decades to come.
- tdhz77 6y agoIn this moment I do feel like Apple has tackled its goal of making computing more accessible. I just didn’t realize ibm wouldn’t change their playbook.
- Bud 6y agoWait. IBM still makes CPUs? IBM still makes anything?
- _-david-_ 6y agoThey design them but do not actually make CPUs. They are fabless.
- jbverschoor 6y agoLook at how huuuuuuge those dies are!
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSo, will you be able to install 'Blue Hat' on it? Or do they have another niche OS for it instead?
- Bloggerzune 6y agoIf you're a blogger, then you'll always be struggling to bring traffic to your blog or website. You recognize that to bring traffic from the program to your blog, you've got to try to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your blog. So now, once you do research on many various SEO related blogs about ways of doing it, different things are told to you everywhere. Now, which items are right or not, it depends on your understanding and knowledge. Let us still have some myths that mislead people without reference to SEO. Today we'll mention similar things during this article.https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/10-Most-Important-SEO-Strategies.html?m=1 https://www.bloggerzune.com/2020/06/10-Most-Important-SEO-St...
- tgflynn 6y agoSo who is going to actually fabricate these chips, Samsung ? IBM transferred its own chip fab business to Global Foundries several years ago and it was my understanding that they were tied to them for the following 10 years. But Global Foundries announced they were abandoning EUV so I don't think they're going to be producing 7nm chips.
- bgorman 6y agoFrom the link > Samsung Electronics will manufacture the IBM POWER10 processor, combining Samsung's industry-leading semiconductor manufacturing technology with IBM's CPU designs.
- tgflynn 6y agoThanks, I missed that, didn't read the PR all the way to the end. I wonder how they got out of their deal with Global Foundries.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoAre they barred from defense work now?
- TheMerovingian 6y agoAnyone know if it will be littleBig endian?
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoIBM is dying a slow death; they still "milk" the market with old stuff like AS/400, because of a superb lock-in. The "Power" business is still doing ok; but I'd bet in a few years one of the other big guys will go at it (maybe Nvidia?) and start eating at their market share.
- ponker 6y agoCan anyone give a description of what these chips are used for and by whom? And who writes software for these architectures? Seems like a totally different side of the industry that I know nothing about.
- gautamcgoel 6y agoIt's bittersweet reading these IBM announcements. They clearly have amazing hardware, but I'll probably never get to play with it, since they make no effort to sell to consumers (unlike Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc).
- bogomipz 6y ago>"With hardware co-optimized for Red Hat OpenShift, IBM POWER10-based servers will deliver the future of the hybrid cloud when they become available in the second half of 2021." Can someone say what co-optimized mean here? Is this just bad marketing speak? What is intended to mean if so?