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IBM's Power11 Processor Architecture
- fidotron 1y agoI can't be the only one that simultaneously appreciates that IBM are still in the game but remains mystified as to who is actually buying and using this stuff. They simply have to have some farms in government running this to make it make sense.
- vb-8448 1y agoThere are still plenty of IBM-I (formerly as400) and AIX installations around Europe.
- Someone 1y agoThe statistic to look at is not how many there are, but how many get sold nowadays. Also, how does “plenty” compare to the millions (50 million or so, it seems from a quick search) x64s that Intel sells per year? Do they even sell 1% of that?
- CursedSilicon 1y agoOn the low-end. Ever shopped at Costco? It's all IBM AS/400's handling the back-end. That's why all their Windows 11 PC's have big black and green terminal apps running front and center On the high-end? Banks, airports, hospitals, research labs. There's a lot of places that need the kind of fault tolerance that specifically IBM POWER systems provide EDIT: Okay, IBM POWER "systems". They've been described as mainframes to me so I went with that terminology
- gosub100 1y agoI seriously doubt there's a POWER mainframe in the back of Costco to handle the 3 UPC barcode scans per second. It's possible that every Costco store funnels its orders to a single mainframe somewhere. I think a more realistic case is the visa and MasterCard credit card networks that have almost 0% downtime.
- dardeaup 1y agoNo such thing as a POWER mainframe. IBM's POWER lines (i and p) are different from their mainframe line (z).
- chiffre01 1y agoI think it's more likely they have a rack of IBM iSeries servers in the back someplace, or maybe in a colo data center.
- CursedSilicon 1y agoNot a POWER Mainframe, no. But AS/400's come in many sizes. The smallest ones are roughly the size of a standard workstation
- pjmlp 1y agoBack in 1994, they were small enough like a big PC tower, I used to seat on one occasionally, that was out of order. One of my Summer intern jobs was to run backups every few days on a AS/400 system. That "seat" was the old one that was yet to be collected.
- RaftPeople 1y ago> Back in 1994, they were small enough like a big PC tower, Back then their model lineup ranged from the small size like you mention to approx 3 or 4 refrigerator size at the high end. When I did some system work out at Costco in the 90's they had 4 of the largest models connected together in one system image (sysplex I think).
- pjmlp 1y agoIndeed, never saw other sizes in real, only on magazine ads.
- yencabulator 1y agoJust for completionism, two decades back the absolute smallest zSeries was a "rolling box", low and squat, that just barely fit into an office building elevator. Think of a short rack tipped on its side with wheels, but all a single computer. IBM loaned us one to port our Linux software to it. Normal zSeries are like a custom rack to multiple racks, except again all a single computer. The smallest iSeries I've seen was essentially an "oversize tower PC" form factor.
- wolf550e 1y ago"mainframes" are z/Architecture, not POWER.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 1y agoIBM Z mainframes use Z processors and now Telum, Telum II processors, not POWER.
- inkyoto 1y agoz Series have used both, POWER and TELUM (I and II) processors. For many years, the 64-bit extension of the original S/360/370/390 architecture was emulated in the software layer via the static binary translation – just like the i Series AS/400 have been doing since the inception, and there was no native S/360 implementation in silicon for a fairly long time. If my understanding is correct, with TELUM processors, IBM has gone back to implementing the ISA in silicon, although the available details on TELUM are scarce.
- nabla9 1y agoYour understanding is not correct. IBM z15 mainframes had z15 chip now they have Tellum. z chips are their own line. z14, z13, ...
- ch_123 1y agoThis (and variations) is commonly believed but not the case - IBM's Z hardware has always used processors which natively implement the Z instruction set. I think part of the source of the confusion is a presentation from years ago which showed that some IP is shared between the Z and Power CPUs.
- sillywalk 1y ago> a presentation from years ago which showed that some IP is shared between the Z and Power CPUs. The eCLIPz project, for the POWER6 & Z10[0]. "The z10 processor was co-developed with and shares many design traits with the POWER6 processor, such as fabrication technology, logic design, execution unit, floating-point units, bus technology (GX bus) and pipeline design style, i.e., a high frequency, low latency, deep (14 stages in the z10), in-order pipeline. However, the processors are quite dissimilar in other respects, such as cache hierarchy and coherency, SMP topology and protocol, and chip organization."[1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494225 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10
- nxobject 1y agoFor background to sibling comments - AS/400 aka "System i" was historically a separate line of processors, but is now POWER running a software translation layer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI To illustrate why the AS/400 had its market niche, the Cali Cartel had a very successful installation of an AS/400. Apparently they used it to do both "business analytics" and back-office tasks. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-1994/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-...
- ch_123 1y ago> For background to sibling comments - AS/400 aka "System i" was historically a separate line of processors, but is now POWER running a software translation layer. The software translation layer has been a feature of the platform dating back to the System/38 days, and was specifically intended to allow the CPU architecture to change without breaking software compatibility. IBM i also has the "PASE" layer, which is a binary compatibility layer for AIX. Those applications do not use the translation layer.
- dlcarrier 1y agoIt's more beuroacracies in general than government in particular.
- pram 1y agoPeople stuck on DB2 is the answer.
- nine_k 1y agoGoogle used to use POWER9 chips, but they apparently have stopped. I suppose the military should buy a significant amount, because they require 100% US-based development and manufacture.
- sidkshatriya 1y agoPower chips are made by Samsung according to the article. The fab for that is probably in Korea.
- DebtDeflation 1y agoThere used to be stories about small manufacturing companies that bought AS/400s in the early 1990s, installed them in their factories, then at some point there was construction and walls were built around them, and then they were discovered 20+ years later, still running, when they were upgrading their production lines and trying to figure out what was actually running them.
- JLO64 1y agoI hate phrasing a question like this, but I would genuinely like to know who the customer for this architecture is. My understanding is that cloud (and for that matter consumer) is all x86/ARM. So is it science/defense that makes up their user base? I have an acquaintance who works at NASA mention that IBM stuff was really good for processing large amounts of data fast. Is that their primary advantage over other architectures?
- dmitrygr 1y agomainframes edit: thought some ibm mainframes used power in helper roles.
- wmf 1y agoIBM pulled out of the HPC market several years ago.
- wmf 1y agoBesides the memory improvements these slides are really vague.
- rbanffy 1y agoI get that the changes weren’t that pronounced between 10 and 11 in other aspects. I was really expecting more details on POWER12 this year.
- sillywalk 1y agoThere was an earlier article that had more details[0]. And the Redbook for the High-End server[1] has a lot of information. [0] https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-power11-launched-with-up-to-2048-threads-and-ddimm-support/ https://www.servethehome.com/ibm-power11-launched-with-up-to... [1] https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg248587.pdf https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/pdfs/sg248587.pdf
- doctorshady 1y agoI love working with the POWER ISA, it makes me happy to see they're still making high performance chips. I really wish these were more accessible to the average user though.
- TheAmazingRace 1y agoAllegedly, Raptor Computing Systems (RCS) is working with another outfit called Solid Silicon to produce a Power ISA CPU that is more accessible to mere mortals. Though based on what I've read so far, it all feels like vaporware.
- Keyframe 1y agojudging by the comments and (lack of proper) answers, the realm mystery is who are the customers?! Before, POWER excelled at bandwidth.. like real torrent of bandwidth. What's the edge these days?
- favorited 1y agoIt was z, not Power, but I really enjoyed STH's recent video going through the design of the z17 mainframe with IBM folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8oLfMXUo0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8oLfMXUo0U
- russellbeattie 1y agoThat was really interesting! All that proprietary hardware is mind blowing. The cost of those mainframes must be mind boggling, let alone the maintenance costs. It answers the question, "What does IBM do nowadays?" But one thing I never knew about before was covered in just a few seconds in the video: 40+ layer motherboard PCBs. Holy cow, it was like a half inch thick! It makes sense now that I think about it considering how many components are slotted into it, but for some reason it never dawned on me that you could have a PCB that was so huge vertically.
- favorited 1y agoYeah, that PCB blew my mind as well! Especially how it enables them to have no wires in these systems.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoThe memory improvement seems so so awesome. 3x the bandwidth, 2x capacity, via Open Memory Interface (OMI) buffers. Really looking forward to x86 getting similar: Intel's MR-DIMM and industry standard MCR-DIMM are both sort of happening. Intel's Granite Rapids (Xeon 6900P series) for example takes either DDR5-6400 or MRDIMM-8800, a 38% increase. And which should also allow a capacity increase, up to 256GB dimms supposedly. But so far, seems like 96GB is as big as we get, and MCR-DIMMs are still work-in-progress. https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon6-mrdimm-ddr5 https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-xeon6-mrdimm-ddr5 https://www.serversupply.com/MEMORY/PC5-70400/96GB/MICRON/MTC40F204WS1HC88XC1R_397301.htm https://www.serversupply.com/MEMORY/PC5-70400/96GB/MICRON/MT...
- sllabres 1y agoFor those who have asked who runs this system: Power systems today run either "AS/400" aka iSeries, IBMs traditional Unix (AIX) or Linux (RedHat or SuSE). In addition to the technical parameters mentioned in the article (an IBM Red Book would certainly provide more): From what I know from conversations, SAP users are a large customers base for Power systems. I think the size of the possible main memory might be one reason, persistent main memory [1] could be another, in my opinion. But this feature is not new, it was available at least with Power 9. The systems are available with up to 64 TB memory (I don't know if all this memory would by available for one process, but from what I have read at least 32 TB is) and that seems to mix well with SAP HANA. Another reason is licensing. LPAR partition is considered hard partitioning for Oracle databases, which makes licensing much easier and, in many configurations, also more cost-effective. [2] Then there are several RAS features. Think of: if one core of a processor in a x86 server dies, your server dies. This is not the case in the IBM Power environment. These days many customers are happy with horizontal redundancy, but not all are equal. [1] https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blog-posts-by-members/sap-hana-persistent-memory-using-ibm-s-vpmem-configuration/ba-p/13448091 https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blog-posts-by-member... [2] https://oraclelicensingexperts.com/oracle-licensing-virtualized/#Oracles_Partitioning_Policy_Soft_vs_Hard_Partitioning https://oraclelicensingexperts.com/oracle-licensing-virtuali...
- imglorp 1y agoSome are doing model inference. https://wallaroo.ai/optimizing-ai-inference-and-governance-with-wallaroo-on-ibm-power/ https://wallaroo.ai/optimizing-ai-inference-and-governance-w...
- sillywalk 1y agoNitpick: it's no longer iSeries, it's the unsearchable IBM i now. I believe it goes (System/38)->AS/400->AS400e->System i->iSeries->i5->i > if one core of a processor in a x86 server dies, your server dies. This is not the case in the IBM Power environment. I believe that having a spare processor core is new to POWER11. EDIT: No. I was wrong.
- sllabres 1y ago
- ChuckMcM 1y agoAs a systems architecture dilettante I really like the Power architecture. It is old school super computer / mainframe architecture on a chip. Parallel processing architecture that makes cross domain inferences impossible etc etc. A crazy friend of mine had a workstation with a Power10 main board in it running Redhat Linux. Other than the fact that it used what was essentially a rack server main board so had these 8 fans that blew through the chassis like a 747 on take off it was pretty neat.
- SlowTao 1y agoDont need a Power10 for that. Just get a Powermac G5 tower in a kernel panic and those fans will be flying!
- MrDrMcCoy 1y agoWould love to have one in my homelab, but they're functionally impossible to acquire.
- Fade_Dance 1y agoPresumably they don't run forever and are eventually upgraded... Well, let's assume they do run forever since we're talking mainframes, even then there would be the occasional upgrade. What happens to the old ones? Presumably it's not like standard servers and workstations where you end up finding 100 pages of Old Dell servers on eBay, but they have to go somewhere, no? Straight to the shredder?
- unnah 1y agoYou can find quite a few used Power 8 and Power 9 servers for sale on ebay. The prices range from a thousand dollars or euros to a few thousand, so not for everyone but well within the reach of a well-off hobbyist.
- russellbeattie 1y agoHow are all the features of an architecture like this utilized? Does the hardware automatically take advantage of all the cache, RAM, threads, etc., or are mainframe applications specifically written with chunks of low-level assembly to optimize for the specific features of the chip and supporting hardware? The devs that write the compilers must be geniuses.
- bsder 1y agoIs there some technical limitation as to why IBM Power systems aren't leading the charge with AI? Or are the people using them just keeping really quiet that they have a superpower and not letting anybody know? It seems like these systems should be stupidly good at AI training. What am I missing?
- wmf 1y agoGPUs are much better for AI than CPUs and Power CPUs are also far behind Intel/AMD.
- bsder 1y agoYour statement tells me precisely nothing. From my, admittedly uninformed, position, AI training requires big memory and enough processing units to keep the bandwidth to that memory fully utilized--things which Power should be very good at.