5 ms·
Cache splash in Telum means seventh heaven for POWER11?
- buildbot 5y agoI was really surprised by this cache design, in a good way. It's a very interesting innovation, one of those that is simple once you hear it but nobody (as far as I know?) has tried this approach yet. I think it's very clever for a large distributed system like the Z mainframes; It would be fun to build some Network on Chip FPGA designs using this approach to model how it would perform!
- api 5y agoOne thing I wish modern multi core chips had was some way to just directly transfer core to core. That would be really interesting, though I suppose it might be really hard to make it play nice with OS abstractions. Might only be useful in specialized HPC applications.
- tux3 5y agoWell.. you can play cacheline ping pong between cores today! No going to DRAM, straight from core to core. But I'm curious what sort of algorithm you have in mind that needs to spend a lot of time moving data between cores. Maybe some sort of algorithm that needs to alternate short steps of aggregating intermediate data and re-distributing the result to every core, in a loop? So, the shape of the problem that would fit this solution is not obvious to me :) Embarassingly parallel algorithms are the ideal. The less communication, the less Amdhal's tax costs you.
- Jweb_Guru 5y agoSome general purposes CPUs do have stuff like that, but apparently it's rarely used and often buggy due to neither being well tested nor going through the usual cache protocol.
- shaklee3 5y agoGPUs have this with warp instructions
- jyounker 5y agoEverything old is new again. In the 90's Kendall Square Research built modular supercomputers based around using nothing but cache. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_Square_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_Square_Research
- buildbot 5y agoThis is really awesome, thanks for the link!
- addaon 5y agoPrevious discussion about the cache structure (not in the context of POWER) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401737
- RedShift1 5y agoIs there any chance this will reach normal mortals? Looking at the Basic Talos II motherboard and CPU bundle, that's already 3480 USD. If you want to get into the powerpc architecture your only option is second hand systems or be lucky enough to have this hardware in your workplace?
- classichasclass 5y agoT2 Lite and Blackbird are certainly less expensive options. Still, the major cost is the logic board because there are no economies of scale (but the CPU cost, compared core to core and cache to cache, is actually competitive with x86: IBM makes those in rather more volume than Raptor and others manufacture OpenPOWER boards).
- numpad0 5y agoPOWER in uppercase had always been for clustered mainframes and full depth racked servers
- zozbot234 5y ago> Looking at the Basic Talos II motherboard and CPU bundle, that's already 3480 USD. That's quite competitive with AmigaOne once you account for the far better performance you get with the Talos. Run a free AROS operating system on the board and you've got a great, future-proof machine for all sorts of uses.
- R0b0t1 5y agoIt's achievable (for most people I suspect frequent HN, anyway) if you put away a couple months of disposable income. If you don't care about playing games on it it's about the same cost as a high end gaming computer, and what games were you gonna play anyway?
- samus 5y agoIf the virtualization story is good, it might still work out. The only concern is the graphics accelerations part. That hardware could be fully handled by the VM though too.