Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

eetimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 156 posts

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#31

Post by rwmj »

kev009 wrote: post #24
Twirrim wrote: post #13

One thing I think IBM has failed to grasp about POWER architecture is how to get people to use it. Lots of people in tech talk about being interested in trying it, it has a number of interesting characteristics, but the barrier for entry is fairly high. It's possible to get a POWER8 based server on Softlayer, IBM's cloud product, but not as a VM. You can get one as a bare metal server, but you can't get one for an ho…

Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.

Come on, you can buy a load of ARM 64 bit development boards starting from just a few tens of dollars. There is no problem at all getting access to ARM. And from there you can scale up to Cavium 2 or Amberwing which have Xeon-like performance (better than Xeon in some ways). If there's a problem with ARM I'd say it's still the lack of standardization, and also very few mid-range servers.

POWER is nothing like this. There are no development boards at all, for anything less than $thousands, and the real servers have great performance but sky-high prices.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#32

Post by marshray »

kev009 wrote: post #24
Twirrim wrote: post #13

One thing I think IBM has failed to grasp about POWER architecture is how to get people to use it. Lots of people in tech talk about being interested in trying it, it has a number of interesting characteristics, but the barrier for entry is fairly high. It's possible to get a POWER8 based server on Softlayer, IBM's cloud product, but not as a VM. You can get one as a bare metal server, but you can't get one for an ho…

Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.

But it is worse. Over 12 million Ras Pis have been sold, I see them just lying around on developer's desks all the time. I don't think I've ever even seen a bootable Power system.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#33

Post by blattimwind »

rwmj wrote: post #31
kev009 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.

Come on, you can buy a load of ARM 64 bit development boards starting from just a few tens of dollars. There is no problem at all getting access to ARM. And from there you can scale up to Cavium 2 or Amberwing which have Xeon-like performance (better than Xeon in some ways). If there's a problem with ARM I'd say it's still the lack of standardization, and also very few mid-range servers. POWER is nothing like this. T…

ARM dev boards are generally based on toy-sized SoCs, though.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#34

Post by ChuckMcM »

marshray wrote: post #26
Nomentatus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses this at a couple of points, do you know factors which would counter its argument, or are you just pointing to the same history the article pointed to? e.g.: "Power 9 should do better than its predecessors given its costs, bandwidth, and ease of porting. Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50%…

IBM will never understand this but few, if any, architectures have made it into the datacenter that were not first affordable for experimenters and enthusiasts. The burden of proof is on those claiming the pricing does not present a barrier to entry to the ecosystem. I am curious about developing for Power. Please link me to an entry-level system I can buy on the web.

Well there are some counter examples, network switches, fiber channel, and Infiniband come to mind. And of course IBM "invented" the data center by defining environmental requirements for their machines in the 50's and 60's.

Setting that aside though, its true that easy experimental access can allow a technology to "sneak in" to a market that previously ignored it, but that isn't really the case here. (nor was it the case for SPARC or Itanium) These systems are being built for folks who are going to deploy a lot of them and they already know their cost of ownership numbers for existing x64 boxes.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#35

Post by YawningAngel »

marshray wrote: post #26
Nomentatus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses this at a couple of points, do you know factors which would counter its argument, or are you just pointing to the same history the article pointed to? e.g.: "Power 9 should do better than its predecessors given its costs, bandwidth, and ease of porting. Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50%…

IBM will never understand this but few, if any, architectures have made it into the datacenter that were not first affordable for experimenters and enthusiasts. The burden of proof is on those claiming the pricing does not present a barrier to entry to the ecosystem. I am curious about developing for Power. Please link me to an entry-level system I can buy on the web.

Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? There are piles of Enterprise software written in Java that can be shifted to any architecture you care to name on a moment's notice. Lots of Java shops would bite your hand off if offered a 20% price cut for instances in exchange for switching architectures.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#36

Post by kev009 »

rwmj wrote: post #31
kev009 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.

Come on, you can buy a load of ARM 64 bit development boards starting from just a few tens of dollars. There is no problem at all getting access to ARM. And from there you can scale up to Cavium 2 or Amberwing which have Xeon-like performance (better than Xeon in some ways). If there's a problem with ARM I'd say it's still the lack of standardization, and also very few mid-range servers. POWER is nothing like this. T…

You can't actually buy TX2. I don't know about market availability of Amberwing either (if you know please let me know). There is an abundance of arm stuff in the embedded space where it is king, and it's true you can pick them up for next to nothing but somewhat orthogonal to servers (flattened device trees vs ACPI/UEFI etc)

You can web buy an S821LC straight from IBM for $5k for the past couple years. The AC922 is GA. Supermicro will sell you a P8 right now and P9 in May for nominal prices and the CPUs are cheaper than Skylake by a very wide margin.

Not directly related to your comment but I get the feeling a lot of people complaining about price are navel gazing and have no idea how much a production server costs and how the costs break down. Right now storage is generally 50+% of the cost. DRAM is a very high fixed cost at the moment as well. Intel flatted the quad socket SKUs into the "Scalable Series" so Skylake represents a big price increase for a lot of builders. To help re-calibrate people, IBM doesn't have $6-12k CPUs in the dual socket config but Intel does at bins people would want for common workloads.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#37

Post by Thaxll »

floren wrote: post #9
Thaxll wrote: post #6

Code running on Intel proc is much faster than anything else, I'm not sure how long it would take to catch up with the performance they provide.

Do you have actual benchmarks of x86 vs. Power 9 or are you just talking out your ass?

With all the stuff running on x86 for the past 30 years + all the perf optimizations in compilers it's not hard to figure.

If ARM or Power were faster than x86 we would be using it right now on servers, most of the top500 HPC clusters run on x86_64 ( Intel Xeon ).

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#38

Post by opencl »

aseipp wrote: post #29
saas_co_de wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing I think IBM has failed to grasp about POWER architecture is how to get people to use it. I don't think IBM cares about people using it, especially people who can't afford $1000 dollars. They are only interested in high margin corp/gov pork barrel deals and need something that they can plausibly claim is superior in order to charge 10X for it.

They definitely aren't charging 10X for it, it's very much in line and competitive at the Xeon level in terms of pricing, and they shine for certain workloads, especially with the new interconnects (CAPI, NVLink). POWER8 was harder to find, but the performance characteristics were good (in my experiments). And now the software is better (more solid ports) and cost is down. I'm eagerly awaiting the chips to hit this y…

The mobo+single quad core CPU is $2,475, that's way more than the threadripper setup and the threadripper has 4x the core count.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#39

Post by stusmall »

marshray wrote: post #32
kev009 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise" Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence. Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.

But it is worse. Over 12 million Ras Pis have been sold, I see them just lying around on developer's desks all the time. I don't think I've ever even seen a bootable Power system.

The local UUG I was a part of had one available through the IBM innovation center. You were able to schedule time on it to experiment. Even with that close access it seemed like a PITA.

Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems

#40

Post by berkut »

floren wrote: post #9
Thaxll wrote: post #6

Code running on Intel proc is much faster than anything else, I'm not sure how long it would take to catch up with the performance they provide.

Do you have actual benchmarks of x86 vs. Power 9 or are you just talking out your ass?

For well-optimised floating point calculations, this is generally true (even taking into account the SMT capabilities of Power8). Intel also has 8-wide (and more) SIMD in terms of intrinsics (AVX/AVX512), whilst Power is still limited to 4-wide with AltiVec, although with Power9 VSX should allow wider (I think).

Where Power8/9 really shines is memory bandwidth - it's orders of magnitude faster than leading edge Intel stuff currently. But if you're not memory constrained, Intel machines can still have a bit of an edge.

Post reply on HN