14 ms·

IBM Opens Power Microprocessor Architecture

160 points by kjhughes 13y ago

hapless 13y ago
A particularly desperate move from IBM. This is uncomfortably close to SPARC's story. Sun opened up SPARC designs in 2005. Four years later, the "Rock" project was canceled, marking an end for world-beating SPARC performance. (Later Sun/Oracle chips have all been based on "Niagara," a low-end chip that didn't even hope to compete on performance. It was intended to be massively multicore and inexpensive, and it was at least one of those things.)
- binarycrusader 13y ago
  I think your conclusion, "end for world-beating SPARC performance", is perhaps based on out of date information: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/sun-sparc-enterprise-t-servers-078532.html http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/s... Also, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see there's even more performance improvements scheduled in the near future: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sp...
  - hapless 13y ago
    Oracle's current chips are derived from the massively-multicore Niagara, not from Rock or UltraSPARC III/IV. As a result, you might notice that the benchmarks Oracle brags about are SPECjbb and TPC-C. These are benchmarks that reward integer perf and parallelism, not single-thread or floating-point performance. On SPEC's general purpose benchmark, SPECcpu, Oracle published only three SPARC results. All three are from Fujitsu chips in re-branded Fujitsu systems. Oracle just doesn't publish results for their in-house chips. I imagine they ran the benchmarks and decided the poor results did not fit their marketing message. http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html
    - binarycrusader 13y ago
      Oracle has actually published other SPARC results that are not for Fujitsu chips for SPEC CPU: https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_speccpu2006_rate https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_sp... http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html While I can't provide you my own detailed benchmarks, I can tell you anecdotally that the most recent SPARC hardware has significantly better single-threaded performance than the early T1, T2 series. As an example, one of the projects I work on is written almost entirely in Python, and so is almost completely single-threaded (only the transport is multi-threaded using libcurl). I had an opportunity to compare the performance on the T5 to the T1 and found it was practically night and day, and the performance of the program seems just as snappy as it does on any Xeon system I've used. Anecdotally, I can tell you that given a choice between a fully-loaded Xeon box or one of the newest SPARC servers, most of the developers I work with will choose the SPARC server simply because builds take significantly less time.
      - hapless 13y ago
        Those are the SPECint_rate benchmarks, for throughput. These are different from the regular SPECint, and they're published separately. Oracle has published no regular SPECcpu scores. Even the rate benchmarks are not very impressive. Oracle rigged the comparison in their press release. They compare a 16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel. If we do apples-to-apples, the Oracle result is pretty humdrum: - Oracle T5-1B, 16-core SPARC, 436 / 467 - Dell M520, 16-core Intel, 533 / 553 The M520 contains 2x E5-2450@2.1 GHz. This is far from the fastest Intel chip. You can get them up to 3.6 GHz. It's just a common and inexpensive configuration. Let's not even talk about the respective pricing. Personally, I haven't used anything newer than a T1. Because I haven't seen anyone buy a new Sun box in that long!
        hga 13y ago
        Given the vastly different design philosophies of these two architectures, why is a comparison of a "16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel" inherently rigged? Aren't those SPARC cores a lot smaller than x86_64 cores? I mean, the first SPARC CPU was implemented on 2 20,000 gate Fujitsu gate-arrays (2nd was the floating point unit)....
justincormack 13y ago
I can't actually see anything on Tyan's site about a board. Elsewhere Google says it is going to be cheap. But it would be nice if it was available.
rwmj 13y ago
This is not actually "open" as in free and open source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation
- noahl 13y ago
  "Open" here seems to mean that other companies can license IBM's core designs to use as part of a larger chip, and also that the instruction set itself will be public (although IBM's implementation will not be).
- tormeh 13y ago
  That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would probably be more diverse if everyone could use the ISA.
  - Symmetry 13y ago
    Well, there's OpenRISC[1] and I believe SPARC is too. At least there are open source implementations including Sun's first Niagara. [1]http://www.openrisc.net/ http://www.openrisc.net/
    - dman 13y ago
      I miss Sun's brand of idealism before profits sometimes.
      - yuhong 13y ago
        Yea, it is sad that Jonathan Schwartz had problems too.
      - mrbill 13y ago
        I miss Sun's "use our enterprise software, only pay if you need support" licensing. Oracle deep-sixed that as soon as possible, along with the pseudo-hobbyist licensing terms for the OS, effectively killing a large portion of the hobbyist and "sysadmin with a setup at home" market. I ran (well, still do) a website dedicated to Sun/Solaris hardware and software users, was on the OpenSolaris external pre-release beta testing team/group, and heard lots of moaning about this, even from sales people within Oracle itself. Pre-Oracle Sun was gracious and gave me a loaded SunFire T1000 to run the site and mailing lists, etc, on. Post-Sun Oracle gave me the finger.
dman 13y ago
If they want adoption they will have to bring the price of entry level power pc systems down. Also wonder if its a year or two too late. AMD seems to have picked ARM as their plan B strategy realising that competing with Intel on x86 is hard to do with reasonable margins. Wonder if AMD would have picked POWER if it was available as an alternative a couple of years back.
- VonGuard 13y ago
  No, they still would have picked ARM. Why? Because every mobile device with uptake uses ARM, and Intel has no play there.
  - dman 13y ago
    AMD is not playing in the mobile space with ARM. They realise they are not large enough like Intel to spend their way into the ARM market. ARM is interesting because you have Apple and Qualcomm at the high end, but you also have Mediatek and RockChip at the low end. AMD cant play the "more value for money" in ARM mobile that they do with x86 - because there are already people doing it.
    - higherpurpose 13y ago
      No, but following the disruption innovation theory, ARM should soon work its way up, while it will cannibalize Intel and force it to move increasingly upmarket (servers, etc) to chase profits. Intel is already losing billions subsidizing Atom chips [1], their "real" competitors to ARM chips, to make them at least semi-attractive to OEMs (which will really get the short end of the stick, if they go with Intel anyway, because if they do help Intel succeed, Intel is going to immediately increase prices on them, to turn the division profitable again). ARM chips don't have to "beat" Intel. They just have to become good enough for desktop performance, while costing much less. [1] - http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-lose-1bn-quarter-mobile-year-2014-04/ http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-lose-1b...
mrweasel 13y ago
I honestly thought that the Power architecture was already open. Guess not.
- wmf 13y ago
  It's been varying degrees of open all along; there was AIM and Exponential in the 90s and then PA Semi and AMCC ten years ago. But marketing/branding/strategy people need to stay employed.
ausjke 13y ago
the major power licensees were Freescale and AMCC, the rest is too small to be meaningful, if any. Both Freescale and AMCC are shifting towards ARM and not in the foundation? With or without them, it's probably too little too late for this architecture, sigh. MIPS, UltraSparc, and Power, are sadly fading away.
mindcrime 13y ago
I keep hearing "IBM is opening POWER", but I still don't see any obvious route to dial up Asus or Tyan and order a cheap ATX motherboard that I can slap a POWER processor on, and build a machine to play with. Until that day comes, it's hard for me to get excited about POWER, as much as I might otherwise want to.
- wmf 13y ago
  In that case you should probably avoid the Open Compute Project, too.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    I don't really understand this comment. OCP, from what I've seen, is mostly dealing with designs for servers built using x86 and/or ARM processors, of which there are plenty of off the shelf motherboards already available. If people are building (or start building) OCP spec motherboards, so much the better. But with POWER, it's always been just short of impossible to buy an "off the shelf" motherboard with a normal form-factor, that uses normal RAM, etc., and put a box together. And, IMO, when an architecture is that inaccessible to the hobbyists and experimenters and tinkerers, it really hinders it. I know it definitely diminishes my personal interest, and I want to be an IBM fan in many ways.
    - wmf 13y ago
      I get the impression that you can buy 1,000 OCP servers but you can't buy one; I wouldn't be surprised if OpenPower is the same way. But if you want one Power8 maybe you can just buy a server from IBM.
      - mindcrime 13y ago
        I get the impression that you can buy 1,000 OCP servers but you can't buy one; Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that's kind of a bummer if that is actually the case. I haven't really looked into buying any OCP servers, so I wasn't aware of that situation.
zvrba 13y ago
What can today POWER do that neither Intel nor ARM can? What is its relevance?
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I'm not sure it can do anything that ARM and x86 can't. But the relevance is that it provides competition to both of those, and competition is good because it keeps things moving forward. And diversity and choice are (mostly) Good Things.
  - cliffbean 13y ago
    It's unclear. Diversity helps innovation, but it also adds complexity to everyone who builds on top of it. If there's room for significant innovation, it can be worth the complexity. But if there isn't, and there are many signs that there's not much left to do in the traditional general-purpose ISA space, then we're just living with a bunch of complexity for no benefit.
- angersock 13y ago
  Run a PS3.
- mabhatter 13y ago
  The performance is in the SYSTEM architecture. Even a mid sized POWER box can address Hundreds of gigs of RAM, Petabytes of direct attached disk and rooms full of tape stored data. You can make an x86 box do that, but it's not really supported at the "plug bits and go" level. You put POWER boxes in place and don't reboot them for years. (Unless you are smart and do your HA/DR tests like a good kid) For example a Google plays around with racks of disposable X86 boards like candy. When their app becomes "fixed" rather than growing exponentially, they'll want to move to something like POWER because it's DESIGNED to work with dozens of CPUs sharing Petabytes of attached disk easily. Not the silly kludges like Blades, SANS or iSCSI or virtual machines people play with now to hide x86 OS vendor scaling limitations.
  - zvrba 13y ago
matthewmacleod 13y ago
For better or worse, the ISA wars are in one sense over. There's relatively little benefit to be gained from using an architecture other than amd64 or ARM at this point; silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code density etc. The benefits of using amd64 are beyond-compare experience of optimisation, commodity pricing, and legacy compatibility; the costs are negligible. However, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Intel's increasing and complete near-domination of the "not-low-power" CPU market. I'd love to see other high-end silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will encourage competition in the market. AMD's struggling with it, but there's plenty of scope for looking at interesting approaches to increasing performance or reducing power use.
- melling 13y ago
  Intel has dominated for quite some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share In all honesty, beyond the cheap CPU market, most people have gone with Intel for a decade(s).
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    Not really. Intel has been dominating the Windows-compatible desktop computer space and recently made significant progress in the server space but if you lump together mobile and embedded processors and units sold, you'll see is nowhere near a leadership position in overall processor sales.
  - tkinom 13y ago
    ARM CPU/SOC shipped in billions of units. Latest production ARM in Nexus 5, 7 has 4 cores, integrate GPU, VPU (video processing unit.) Run from battery power. IMO, Intel is losing CPU war to ARM. We are also seeing Qualcomm's 64 bits 8 cores going into the next gen phone soon.
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      Intel's position in CPUs is analogous to Apple's position in phones: Less than 15% of the units, but over 50% of the profit. ARM is a commodity market. Nvidia makes its money on GPUs and runs Tegra at a loss. ARM has a huge market cap but barely makes any profit. Samsung makes its money on the phone and other chips. TI found ARM so cutthroat that they've given up and quit. Qualcomm has an enormous market cap (larger than Intel's), but they make almost all of their money on the wireless side. This is why ARM is so dangerous to Intel. While ARM moves upmarket and Intel moves downmarket, Intel is unable to compete on price because the competitors are operating so close to breakeven.
leccine 13y ago
POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced Risc) is an extremely nice architecture compare to the x86. It's firmware system was so ahead of the BIOS disaster (EFi might change this a bit, yet). I remember loading and booting kernels from NFS because you could load the network card drivers[1]. This is 2006, EFI was not known/used widely. The CPU itself has amazing features too.[2] I guess we are seeing another occurrence of Gresham's law applied to the technical field. "Bad architecture drives out good". In this case bad is cheaper, and this is the only thing we care about after all. 1. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware 2. http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Performance_Overview.pdf http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Perf...
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  > EFi might change this a bit, yet As far as I can tell the only reason EFI even exists is NIH syndrome. Intel could have just adopted OpenFirmware for x64, and they still should.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/ http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/
- TwoBit 13y ago
  Everything seems like a nice architecture compared to x86. I do love the PowerPC instruction set though. I'm not a hardware guy, but it always seemed like PowerPC chips underperformed others and ran as hot as hell while doing so.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I seem to remember an article that pointed out some of the POWER addressing modes made it hard to optimize so it always would run slower than other chips. I would really love to hear what the story actually is.
protomyth 13y ago
Can someone explain Google's involvement?
- wmf 13y ago
  Sure, the article itself can explain it: "But analysts say the embrace of Power has two crucial advantages for Google. First, the Internet giant builds its own data centers and tweaks the technology in its server computers, and the licensing regime in the Power foundation is hacker-friendly in a way Intel’s handling of its intellectual property is not. The second advantage for Google is negotiating power..."
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I read the article and didn't find their little explanation to be that good, that's why I asked. Why PowerPC? Why not SPARC or ARM? What got them this involved?
    - ternaryoperator 13y ago
      Given the hatred between Google and Oracle, I expect that even if SPARC were a better solution, Google would look everywhere else first.
    - wmf 13y ago
      Power8 has equal or better performance than Intel; ARM isn't even close.
    - erikj 13y ago
      PowerPC and POWER are different architectures.
      - protomyth 13y ago
        The PowerPC chips fall under the Power ISA standards documents.
frozenport 13y ago
Does anybody know the architectural advantages that POWER has over x86?
- wmf 13y ago
  Depending on what you mean by architecture, there probably aren't many. Maybe reliability and decimal floating point. But IBM's Power server processors tend to be bigger and higher performance than Intel's; e.g. Power8 has four times the threads, four times the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth as Ivy Bridge-EP.
mabhatter 13y ago
This sucks. It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant. POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together. It was never cheap... But it was good. ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an "open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very terrible. It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing for web/email servers. This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.
DonGateley 13y ago
That is very cool. I know that John Cocke who invented the architecture (and was an old drinking buddy of mine) would definitely approve. It was an outgrowth of his work developing the first optimizing compiler (Fortran) with Fran Allen which earned him a Turing Award. Good on ya, Johh, wherever and with whomever you might be sipping now. :-)

160 points by kjhughes 13y ago

A particularly desperate move from IBM. This is uncomfortably close to SPARC's story. Sun opened up SPARC designs in 2005. Four years later, the "Rock" project was canceled, marking an end for world-beating SPARC performance. (Later Sun/Oracle chips have all been based on "Niagara," a low-end chip that didn't even hope to compete on performance. It was intended to be massively multicore and inexpensive, and it was at least one of those things.)

binarycrusader 13y ago
I think your conclusion, "end for world-beating SPARC performance", is perhaps based on out of date information: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/sun-sparc-enterprise-t-servers-078532.html http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-scalability/s... Also, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see there's even more performance improvements scheduled in the near future: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sp...
- hapless 13y ago
  Oracle's current chips are derived from the massively-multicore Niagara, not from Rock or UltraSPARC III/IV. As a result, you might notice that the benchmarks Oracle brags about are SPECjbb and TPC-C. These are benchmarks that reward integer perf and parallelism, not single-thread or floating-point performance. On SPEC's general purpose benchmark, SPECcpu, Oracle published only three SPARC results. All three are from Fujitsu chips in re-branded Fujitsu systems. Oracle just doesn't publish results for their in-house chips. I imagine they ran the benchmarks and decided the poor results did not fit their marketing message. http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html
  - binarycrusader 13y ago
    Oracle has actually published other SPARC results that are not for Fujitsu chips for SPEC CPU: https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_speccpu2006_rate https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_sp... http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html While I can't provide you my own detailed benchmarks, I can tell you anecdotally that the most recent SPARC hardware has significantly better single-threaded performance than the early T1, T2 series. As an example, one of the projects I work on is written almost entirely in Python, and so is almost completely single-threaded (only the transport is multi-threaded using libcurl). I had an opportunity to compare the performance on the T5 to the T1 and found it was practically night and day, and the performance of the program seems just as snappy as it does on any Xeon system I've used. Anecdotally, I can tell you that given a choice between a fully-loaded Xeon box or one of the newest SPARC servers, most of the developers I work with will choose the SPARC server simply because builds take significantly less time.
    - hapless 13y ago
      Those are the SPECint_rate benchmarks, for throughput. These are different from the regular SPECint, and they're published separately. Oracle has published no regular SPECcpu scores. Even the rate benchmarks are not very impressive. Oracle rigged the comparison in their press release. They compare a 16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel. If we do apples-to-apples, the Oracle result is pretty humdrum: - Oracle T5-1B, 16-core SPARC, 436 / 467 - Dell M520, 16-core Intel, 533 / 553 The M520 contains 2x E5-2450@2.1 GHz. This is far from the fastest Intel chip. You can get them up to 3.6 GHz. It's just a common and inexpensive configuration. Let's not even talk about the respective pricing. Personally, I haven't used anything newer than a T1. Because I haven't seen anyone buy a new Sun box in that long!
      - hga 13y ago
        Given the vastly different design philosophies of these two architectures, why is a comparison of a "16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel" inherently rigged? Aren't those SPARC cores a lot smaller than x86_64 cores? I mean, the first SPARC CPU was implemented on 2 20,000 gate Fujitsu gate-arrays (2nd was the floating point unit)....

justincormack 13y ago

I can't actually see anything on Tyan's site about a board. Elsewhere Google says it is going to be cheap. But it would be nice if it was available.

rwmj 13y ago

This is not actually "open" as in free and open source software. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation

noahl 13y ago
"Open" here seems to mean that other companies can license IBM's core designs to use as part of a larger chip, and also that the instruction set itself will be public (although IBM's implementation will not be).
tormeh 13y ago
That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would probably be more diverse if everyone could use the ISA.
- Symmetry 13y ago
  Well, there's OpenRISC[1] and I believe SPARC is too. At least there are open source implementations including Sun's first Niagara. [1]http://www.openrisc.net/ http://www.openrisc.net/
  - dman 13y ago
    I miss Sun's brand of idealism before profits sometimes.
    - yuhong 13y ago
      Yea, it is sad that Jonathan Schwartz had problems too.
    - mrbill 13y ago
      I miss Sun's "use our enterprise software, only pay if you need support" licensing. Oracle deep-sixed that as soon as possible, along with the pseudo-hobbyist licensing terms for the OS, effectively killing a large portion of the hobbyist and "sysadmin with a setup at home" market. I ran (well, still do) a website dedicated to Sun/Solaris hardware and software users, was on the OpenSolaris external pre-release beta testing team/group, and heard lots of moaning about this, even from sales people within Oracle itself. Pre-Oracle Sun was gracious and gave me a loaded SunFire T1000 to run the site and mailing lists, etc, on. Post-Sun Oracle gave me the finger.

dman 13y ago

If they want adoption they will have to bring the price of entry level power pc systems down. Also wonder if its a year or two too late. AMD seems to have picked ARM as their plan B strategy realising that competing with Intel on x86 is hard to do with reasonable margins. Wonder if AMD would have picked POWER if it was available as an alternative a couple of years back.

VonGuard 13y ago
No, they still would have picked ARM. Why? Because every mobile device with uptake uses ARM, and Intel has no play there.
- dman 13y ago
  AMD is not playing in the mobile space with ARM. They realise they are not large enough like Intel to spend their way into the ARM market. ARM is interesting because you have Apple and Qualcomm at the high end, but you also have Mediatek and RockChip at the low end. AMD cant play the "more value for money" in ARM mobile that they do with x86 - because there are already people doing it.
  - higherpurpose 13y ago
    No, but following the disruption innovation theory, ARM should soon work its way up, while it will cannibalize Intel and force it to move increasingly upmarket (servers, etc) to chase profits. Intel is already losing billions subsidizing Atom chips [1], their "real" competitors to ARM chips, to make them at least semi-attractive to OEMs (which will really get the short end of the stick, if they go with Intel anyway, because if they do help Intel succeed, Intel is going to immediately increase prices on them, to turn the division profitable again). ARM chips don't have to "beat" Intel. They just have to become good enough for desktop performance, while costing much less. [1] - http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-lose-1bn-quarter-mobile-year-2014-04/ http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-lose-1b...

mrweasel 13y ago

I honestly thought that the Power architecture was already open. Guess not.

wmf 13y ago
It's been varying degrees of open all along; there was AIM and Exponential in the 90s and then PA Semi and AMCC ten years ago. But marketing/branding/strategy people need to stay employed.

ausjke 13y ago

the major power licensees were Freescale and AMCC, the rest is too small to be meaningful, if any. Both Freescale and AMCC are shifting towards ARM and not in the foundation? With or without them, it's probably too little too late for this architecture, sigh. MIPS, UltraSparc, and Power, are sadly fading away.

mindcrime 13y ago

I keep hearing "IBM is opening POWER", but I still don't see any obvious route to dial up Asus or Tyan and order a cheap ATX motherboard that I can slap a POWER processor on, and build a machine to play with. Until that day comes, it's hard for me to get excited about POWER, as much as I might otherwise want to.

wmf 13y ago
In that case you should probably avoid the Open Compute Project, too.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I don't really understand this comment. OCP, from what I've seen, is mostly dealing with designs for servers built using x86 and/or ARM processors, of which there are plenty of off the shelf motherboards already available. If people are building (or start building) OCP spec motherboards, so much the better. But with POWER, it's always been just short of impossible to buy an "off the shelf" motherboard with a normal form-factor, that uses normal RAM, etc., and put a box together. And, IMO, when an architecture is that inaccessible to the hobbyists and experimenters and tinkerers, it really hinders it. I know it definitely diminishes my personal interest, and I want to be an IBM fan in many ways.
  - wmf 13y ago
    I get the impression that you can buy 1,000 OCP servers but you can't buy one; I wouldn't be surprised if OpenPower is the same way. But if you want one Power8 maybe you can just buy a server from IBM.
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      I get the impression that you can buy 1,000 OCP servers but you can't buy one; Ah, gotcha. Yeah, that's kind of a bummer if that is actually the case. I haven't really looked into buying any OCP servers, so I wasn't aware of that situation.

zvrba 13y ago

What can today POWER do that neither Intel nor ARM can? What is its relevance?

mindcrime 13y ago
I'm not sure it can do anything that ARM and x86 can't. But the relevance is that it provides competition to both of those, and competition is good because it keeps things moving forward. And diversity and choice are (mostly) Good Things.
- cliffbean 13y ago
  It's unclear. Diversity helps innovation, but it also adds complexity to everyone who builds on top of it. If there's room for significant innovation, it can be worth the complexity. But if there isn't, and there are many signs that there's not much left to do in the traditional general-purpose ISA space, then we're just living with a bunch of complexity for no benefit.
angersock 13y ago
Run a PS3.
mabhatter 13y ago
The performance is in the SYSTEM architecture. Even a mid sized POWER box can address Hundreds of gigs of RAM, Petabytes of direct attached disk and rooms full of tape stored data. You can make an x86 box do that, but it's not really supported at the "plug bits and go" level. You put POWER boxes in place and don't reboot them for years. (Unless you are smart and do your HA/DR tests like a good kid) For example a Google plays around with racks of disposable X86 boards like candy. When their app becomes "fixed" rather than growing exponentially, they'll want to move to something like POWER because it's DESIGNED to work with dozens of CPUs sharing Petabytes of attached disk easily. Not the silly kludges like Blades, SANS or iSCSI or virtual machines people play with now to hide x86 OS vendor scaling limitations.
- zvrba 13y ago

matthewmacleod 13y ago

For better or worse, the ISA wars are in one sense over. There's relatively little benefit to be gained from using an architecture other than amd64 or ARM at this point; silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code density etc. The benefits of using amd64 are beyond-compare experience of optimisation, commodity pricing, and legacy compatibility; the costs are negligible. However, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Intel's increasing and complete near-domination of the "not-low-power" CPU market. I'd love to see other high-end silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will encourage competition in the market. AMD's struggling with it, but there's plenty of scope for looking at interesting approaches to increasing performance or reducing power use.

melling 13y ago
Intel has dominated for quite some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share In all honesty, beyond the cheap CPU market, most people have gone with Intel for a decade(s).
- rbanffy 13y ago
  Not really. Intel has been dominating the Windows-compatible desktop computer space and recently made significant progress in the server space but if you lump together mobile and embedded processors and units sold, you'll see is nowhere near a leadership position in overall processor sales.
- tkinom 13y ago
  ARM CPU/SOC shipped in billions of units. Latest production ARM in Nexus 5, 7 has 4 cores, integrate GPU, VPU (video processing unit.) Run from battery power. IMO, Intel is losing CPU war to ARM. We are also seeing Qualcomm's 64 bits 8 cores going into the next gen phone soon.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    Intel's position in CPUs is analogous to Apple's position in phones: Less than 15% of the units, but over 50% of the profit. ARM is a commodity market. Nvidia makes its money on GPUs and runs Tegra at a loss. ARM has a huge market cap but barely makes any profit. Samsung makes its money on the phone and other chips. TI found ARM so cutthroat that they've given up and quit. Qualcomm has an enormous market cap (larger than Intel's), but they make almost all of their money on the wireless side. This is why ARM is so dangerous to Intel. While ARM moves upmarket and Intel moves downmarket, Intel is unable to compete on price because the competitors are operating so close to breakeven.

leccine 13y ago

POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced Risc) is an extremely nice architecture compare to the x86. It's firmware system was so ahead of the BIOS disaster (EFi might change this a bit, yet). I remember loading and booting kernels from NFS because you could load the network card drivers[1]. This is 2006, EFI was not known/used widely. The CPU itself has amazing features too.[2] I guess we are seeing another occurrence of Gresham's law applied to the technical field. "Bad architecture drives out good". In this case bad is cheaper, and this is the only thing we care about after all. 1. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware 2. http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Performance_Overview.pdf http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Perf...

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
> EFi might change this a bit, yet As far as I can tell the only reason EFI even exists is NIH syndrome. Intel could have just adopted OpenFirmware for x64, and they still should.
- yuhong 13y ago
  http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/ http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/
TwoBit 13y ago
Everything seems like a nice architecture compared to x86. I do love the PowerPC instruction set though. I'm not a hardware guy, but it always seemed like PowerPC chips underperformed others and ran as hot as hell while doing so.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I seem to remember an article that pointed out some of the POWER addressing modes made it hard to optimize so it always would run slower than other chips. I would really love to hear what the story actually is.

protomyth 13y ago

Can someone explain Google's involvement?

wmf 13y ago
Sure, the article itself can explain it: "But analysts say the embrace of Power has two crucial advantages for Google. First, the Internet giant builds its own data centers and tweaks the technology in its server computers, and the licensing regime in the Power foundation is hacker-friendly in a way Intel’s handling of its intellectual property is not. The second advantage for Google is negotiating power..."
- protomyth 13y ago
  I read the article and didn't find their little explanation to be that good, that's why I asked. Why PowerPC? Why not SPARC or ARM? What got them this involved?
  - ternaryoperator 13y ago
    Given the hatred between Google and Oracle, I expect that even if SPARC were a better solution, Google would look everywhere else first.
  - wmf 13y ago
    Power8 has equal or better performance than Intel; ARM isn't even close.
  - erikj 13y ago
    PowerPC and POWER are different architectures.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      The PowerPC chips fall under the Power ISA standards documents.

frozenport 13y ago

Does anybody know the architectural advantages that POWER has over x86?

wmf 13y ago
Depending on what you mean by architecture, there probably aren't many. Maybe reliability and decimal floating point. But IBM's Power server processors tend to be bigger and higher performance than Intel's; e.g. Power8 has four times the threads, four times the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth as Ivy Bridge-EP.

mabhatter 13y ago

This sucks. It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant. POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together. It was never cheap... But it was good. ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an "open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very terrible. It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing for web/email servers. This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.

DonGateley 13y ago

That is very cool. I know that John Cocke who invented the architecture (and was an old drinking buddy of mine) would definitely approve. It was an outgrowth of his work developing the first optimizing compiler (Fortran) with Fran Allen which earned him a Turing Award. Good on ya, Johh, wherever and with whomever you might be sipping now. :-)