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

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

#51

Post by classichasclass »

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.

Other than the one in my house, you mean?

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

#52

Post by dragontamer »

slededit wrote: post #45
opencl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The cores are not directly comparable. The Power chip has significantly more hyper threads (and the resources to back them).

For those not in the know:

Each Power9 is consisting of either 2-super slices or 4-super slices, depending on which Power9 you get. (Corresponding to 4x SMT or 8x SMT respectively).

Threadripper has 4x integer pipelines, 4x floating point pipelines, and 2x load/store units (called AGUs by AMD) and supports 2-threads (aka: 2x SMT).

So Threadripper definitely is "broad", but Power9 is "broader". The 8x SMT Power9 can perform 8x loads / stores per cycle per core, while AMD's Threadripper can only perform 2x loads/stores per cycle per core.

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

#53

Post by pm90 »

bluedino wrote: post #11

I can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely. Google, on the other hand would need a reason to switch. Somewhere there's a spreadsheet with a number for energy cost savings that would make it worth it for Google to switch architectures. I've heard it's as low as 10%.

If you read the article, they Demo'd Zaius (POWER9 based server) and apparently have a flag which compiles all (or most? Not clear) their apps to target POWER arch.

Here is the Google Blog post introducing Zaius: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...

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

#54

Post by vbezhenar »

YawningAngel wrote: post #35
marshray wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

JVM is heavily optimized for x64.

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

#55

Post by philipkglass »

berkut wrote: post #40
floren wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That makes Power sound very appealing. I've never met a real life scientific simulation that wasn't often constrained by memory bandwidth. I'm sure they exist, but they aren't all that plentiful. I'd love to try running the code that matters to me on Power. (For one thing, I don't even know if it would pass basic regression tests; numerical code is touchy. Are gcc/gfortran reliably adequate on Power like they are on x64?) Unfortunately, as everyone else is commenting, entry level x64 is dirt cheap and entry level Power isn't.

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

#56

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

SPARC?

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

#57

Post by patrickg_zill »

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.

^^^ this should be the top comment.

Sun/SPARC for example, benefited greatly in Dot-Com v1.0 because so many universities had great prices via edu discounts. The sysadmins and other Unix users all cut their teeth on Sun boxes; so when they got jobs they took along their familiarity with Sun, which resulted in a lot of sales.

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

#58

Post by rbanffy »

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…

This. A million times this.

There are no entry-level POWER machines, SPARC machines. There is no entry-level IBM i or Z. There isn't even a software emulator for i (and even for Z, where there is a very nice emulator, you can't legally run anything remotely current on non-IBM hardware).

You can get a cheap POWER or SPARC on Ebay, with a sharp price drop when the equipment is EOL'ed, but that's no way to entice people to build new stuff on a platform.

I love my PA-RISC, my RS/6000's and my SPARCstations, but, neat as they are, they aren't anything that would make me consider building for their modern descendants. And I won't pay more than a decent, proven, certainly useful Xeon workstation worth of money for a cool, but exotic-that-may-not-run-my-software-well, POWER9 performance equivalent.

If IBM wants me to pay Xeon Platinum prices for their production gear, they'd better allow me to pay Core i prices for development gear, or else I'll just keep deploying on Xeon, which is good enough.

Typed on a very comfortable and reasonably priced Core i7 laptop.

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

#59

Post by marshray »

aidenn0 wrote: post #56
marshray wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SPARC?

Entry level workstations were readily available and all over universities.

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

#60

Post by marshray »

classichasclass wrote: post #51
marshray wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Other than the one in my house, you mean?

Have I been to your house?!
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