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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

#101

Post by rbanffy »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #71
rbanffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent way to cater to the legacy app market, but not a very good way to ride the next wave. The next wave is probably running on commodity x86 hardware running Linux and using gamer-grade GPUs. They'll probably be first deployed to production on x86 virtual hardware in a cloud provider. If you want companies to adopt your technology, make their developers adopt it first. That's how most of the current…

No one has accused of IBM of 'riding the next wave', sometimes I wonder if they even start paddling as the wave swells :-). At least at Google the driving factor is total cost of ownership, full stop. When you need as much compute as they do to deliver on what they deliver, saving a few percent on the TCO flows right to the bottom line. That said I don't see them going full on with this technology if its QP$S[1] isn'…

Buying the perfect hardware for your workload works really well when you have a couple million boxes to run it. POWER9 has the insanely fast NVLink to connect to specialized silicon Google has enough volume to design and build.

Where it can make a substantial dent in the x86 server is precisely this HPC niche. A 10% faster $300 box is worth $30 more, hardly enough to warrant extra work, but a 10% faster $10 million dollar machine is worth a million more.

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

#102

Post by shaklee3 »

rbanffy wrote: post #58
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…

You aren't their target market share. They are focusing solely on the HPC Market at this point. Their lowest in shape has 16 cores. Contrast that with a xeon at 6 cores. I think you were hoping that they have a desktop processor that you could play around with the actual architecture on. That would be nice, but they likely don't want to put all their eggs in too many baskets right now.

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

#104

Post by Nomentatus »

rbanffy wrote: post #63
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an excellent way to cater to the legacy app market, but not a very good way to ride the next wave. The next wave is probably running on commodity x86 hardware running Linux and using gamer-grade GPUs. They'll probably be first deployed to production on x86 virtual hardware in a cloud provider. If you want companies to adopt your technology, make their developers adopt it first. That's how most of the current…

The article addresses this too, favorably. So I take it you're gainsaying the article but it's not quite clear just why.

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

#105

Post by wmf »

slededit wrote: post #90
Quequau wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last presentation on Power at Hotchips left me with the impression that "Core" in IBM terms is 9/10ths marketing speak and whatever Power might have that their engineers might think of as "cores" probably has little to do with what their marketing people are telling their customers and software vendors who do their licensing "per core".

Could you expand a bit on this? Are you saying they are inflating their core count or the reverse? Everything I've looked at indicates significantly more powerful cores.

They "inflated" it from 12 to 24 but recently it looks like they deflated it back to 12 cores. However you count it, a full Power9 chip is competitive with a 24-core Xeon or 32-core Epyc.

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

#106

Post by wmf »

hinkley wrote: post #100
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #5

> 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% Glad to see them throwing in the towel on a pricey and proprietary component. Competition is good.

Didn’t IBM make exactly this same mistake thirty five years ago with PCs??

Which mistake exactly? Note that the Power9 processor itself is single-sourced from IBM so they don't have to worry about clones.

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

#107

Post by wmf »

mariuolo wrote: post #30
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%.

> I can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely. I thought they had a thing for MIPS64, at least in their supercomputers.

MIPS was the thing in China... until it faded away. Then Power8 was the thing but it never shipped. Now we swear ARM is really the thing. Really for real this time.

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

#108

Post by walrus01 »

shaklee3 wrote: post #102
rbanffy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You aren't their target market share. They are focusing solely on the HPC Market at this point. Their lowest in shape has 16 cores. Contrast that with a xeon at 6 cores. I think you were hoping that they have a desktop processor that you could play around with the actual architecture on. That would be nice, but they likely don't want to put all their eggs in too many baskets right now.

Except for special US DoD things (like supercomputers that simulate nuclear weapons) for Sandia Labs and the like, the math also doesn't work out for HPC...

Let's say that a 44RU rack of 1U, narrow (half of 17.5" width), dual motherboard, single socket systems costs $N if it's built with Xeon or EPYC CPUs. As an example here the Supermicro barebones which are two long, narrow motherboards in 1RU with single sockets and front to rear wind tunnel airflow. Same rack of systems costs $N multiplied by 2.25 if built with power9, but only performs 1.25 times faster.

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

#110

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

That pretty much tells the story. A single, last man standing vendor like IBM with a business model of making money on Mainframe/“Midrange”/Old-School Unix boxes will never, ever be Intel. POWER is cool, but who cares.

It’s more productive to think about how to harness lots of cheap ARM cores if intel isn’t doing it for you.

My employer has a few. It’s fast and looks impressive. But when you cut away the bullshit, it mostly exists because the sales guy presented a story where the cost of a new POWER box is a better deal than maintenance on the old one.

If you really dig into it, there’s no scenario other than a license play where a transition to Intel isn’t more cost effective. Even in those scenarios, you can usually engineer a solution (Oracle, etc) where you deliver a better ROI on commodity hardware or cloud hardware.

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