3 ms·

Huh. ARM instead of ppc64le?

rbanffy 1mo ago
ARM has better software support for AI applications and half of their presentation was about their inference accelerators that can go in the mainframes (and POWER machines). IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits. Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.
- avhception 1mo ago
  At least back in the day, there was talk about Nvidia + ppc64le. Wasn't there even a supercomputer with that setup? But I guess that has fallen by the wayside.
  - rbanffy 1mo ago
    Yes. There was a generation of POWER that offered NVLink.
  - shrimppersimmon 1mo ago
    In 2019 the two fastest machines in the world, Summit & Sierra (see top500.org) used ppc64le + Nvidia GPUs.
  - __lm__ 1mo ago
    We have some older Power9 with NVIDIA V100. Nvidia drivers stopped a while ago (before V100 were considered “old” also for x86_64). The main problem is software support by most machine learning libraries. While it is normal to have to compile many things from source when the binary is not provided even by some third party, in some cases the software will not compile on ppc64le and surely is not tested to work.
- Melatonic 1mo ago
  Does anyone else make an ARM CPU that is expressly designed for performance with good cooling ?
  - wmf 1mo ago
    It's not entirely clear what you're asking but... AGI, Vera, X2, Spark.
  - gt0 1mo ago
    Fujitsu replaced their SPARC CPUs with ARM, I think they were pretty good, but last I read about them was a few years ago.
    - pezezin 29d ago
      Fujitsu is developing new ARM based CPUs called Monaka, but their focus seems to be HPC and AI, no mention of "normal" servers
      - avhception 29d ago
        A Fujitsu ARM Server for normal people that I can buy through a normal retail channel and boot a freakin' generic Linux ISO... that would be great! (Yes, I'm aware of Ampere Altra. The space desperately needs competition and commoditization, imho.)
        pezezin 28d ago
        The funny thing is that Fujitsu has a sizable enterprise IT business, and their Primergy servers are very good, so why don't they offer their own ARM CPUs?
        wmf 26d ago
        The previous A64fx was just for HPC. Monaka looks more general purpose so maybe they will sell Monaka servers.

ARM has better software support for AI applications and half of their presentation was about their inference accelerators that can go in the mainframes (and POWER machines). IBM mainframes are almost designed by their users. The previous generation skipped a lot of speed boost on the CPU side because their users didn’t want the machine to blow over their power delivery limits. Now, with their architecture behind it, I’m sure these ARM Linux partitions will have the fastest ARM cores ever made. My experience with Linux on s390x is that it feels like a normal server that’s just ludicrously fast - almost as if it came from the future.

avhception 1mo ago
At least back in the day, there was talk about Nvidia + ppc64le. Wasn't there even a supercomputer with that setup? But I guess that has fallen by the wayside.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  Yes. There was a generation of POWER that offered NVLink.
- shrimppersimmon 1mo ago
  In 2019 the two fastest machines in the world, Summit & Sierra (see top500.org) used ppc64le + Nvidia GPUs.
- __lm__ 1mo ago
  We have some older Power9 with NVIDIA V100. Nvidia drivers stopped a while ago (before V100 were considered “old” also for x86_64). The main problem is software support by most machine learning libraries. While it is normal to have to compile many things from source when the binary is not provided even by some third party, in some cases the software will not compile on ppc64le and surely is not tested to work.
Melatonic 1mo ago
Does anyone else make an ARM CPU that is expressly designed for performance with good cooling ?
- wmf 1mo ago
  It's not entirely clear what you're asking but... AGI, Vera, X2, Spark.
- gt0 1mo ago
  Fujitsu replaced their SPARC CPUs with ARM, I think they were pretty good, but last I read about them was a few years ago.
  - pezezin 29d ago
    Fujitsu is developing new ARM based CPUs called Monaka, but their focus seems to be HPC and AI, no mention of "normal" servers
    - avhception 29d ago
      A Fujitsu ARM Server for normal people that I can buy through a normal retail channel and boot a freakin' generic Linux ISO... that would be great! (Yes, I'm aware of Ampere Altra. The space desperately needs competition and commoditization, imho.)
      - pezezin 28d ago
        The funny thing is that Fujitsu has a sizable enterprise IT business, and their Primergy servers are very good, so why don't they offer their own ARM CPUs?
        wmf 26d ago
        The previous A64fx was just for HPC. Monaka looks more general purpose so maybe they will sell Monaka servers.