4 ms·

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

by zvrba 13y ago

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
  What you're describing sounds more like a combination of better HW (bus, components) and SW (operating system). I agree, IBM delivers superb systems. However: are there any inherent limitations in the x64 architecture which would make it impossible to achieve the same as with POWER, if you designed it from scratch for that kind of robustness?
- anentropic 13y ago
  any sign of this transition happening at Google?

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

by zvrba 13y ago

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

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
What you're describing sounds more like a combination of better HW (bus, components) and SW (operating system). I agree, IBM delivers superb systems. However: are there any inherent limitations in the x64 architecture which would make it impossible to achieve the same as with POWER, if you designed it from scratch for that kind of robustness?
anentropic 13y ago
any sign of this transition happening at Google?