Similar discussion with POWER8 from 2015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519548
Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why can't you buy a TX2? Arrow appears to have 462 in stock right now.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#113One 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…
I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get on board or what strings are attached to it, but https://www-356.ibm.com/partnerworld/wps/servlet/ContentHand... : ”The Power Cloud that enables developers offers no-charge remote access to IBM hardware, including IBM POWER8, IBM POWER7+ and IBM POWER7 processor-based servers on the Linux, IBM AIX and IBM i operating systems.”
No real strings although the machines get recycled weekly and access is via vpn only.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why can't you buy a TX2? Arrow appears to have 462 in stock right now.
I have my own Cavium rep. Show me a real CPU, board and worthwhile sheet metal (i.e 10+ nvme) I can buy in volume because you might know something he doesn't and I'd be happy to eval it.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#115This is only good. Everyone is arguing here about stuff that really does not matter if this move the needle forward.
x64 by AMD pushed Intel to do better. Things became faster / cheaper. AMD fell behind and Intel rested and priced for high end went up. AMD released Ryzen and all of the sudden we see movement from Intel again. ARM on the low end pushed Intel to look at their lower powered chips and try to do better. IBM pushing P9 to win at the top at a reason price point pushed on AMD and Intel. Competition is only good here and brings value to all of us.
All of this is only good.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#116One 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…
So... I sit on the POWER Customer Advisory Board, what you have raised has certainly been something I've told IBM multiple times over the last few meetings I've had with them. I plan to continue pushing on this front.
Thank you. I would love to meet around with POWER, but I don't have any way to get my hands on it for a price I can justify.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
I don't follow the logic. Where are you getting your pricing information from? Why do you think power is more expensive?
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#118I think the formula is simple — if the amount of idle developer time waiting for development gear + the cost of development gear + the cost of porting your software to POWER > the potential cost saving of POWER, don’t touch it.
If POWER unlocks something fundamentally new and historically impossible on X86, like ARM unlocked cell phones, and such, maybe that’s another reason to try it.
At the end of the day, nobody got fired for choosing x86. Its well understood, it’s cheap, development tools are accessible, and it works.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#119That would be nice, but the problem with these systems historically is that they're ridiculously expensive compared to x64 servers for the end user. As a result end users and SMBs never get their hands on them and nobody develops anything for them or supports them.
I can say for sure they are not more expensive than comparable xeons. Even cheaper by some measures.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ).
The new summit supercomputer uses power9. The reason nobody used it before was there was no server processor available.