I'm really excited to get my Talos finally in my hands (was one of the early orders). Good to see Tim Pearson and the demo system. I'm very hopeful the wait will be over soon.
Was privacy your main driving factor for purchasing a Talos?
Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
141–150 of 156 posts
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#142I'm really excited to get my Talos finally in my hands (was one of the early orders). Good to see Tim Pearson and the demo system. I'm very hopeful the wait will be over soon.
Was privacy your main driving factor for purchasing a Talos?
No, it was a workstation powerful enough to be a reasonable alternative to x86 that wasn't x86. I like Power, it's the architecture I'm most familiar with (other than the 6502 8-), and I think Intel needs a big kick right in the effective monopoly.
Sure, I could have bought one of the AmigaOne systems, which would have been somewhat cheaper, but those are basically embedded systems in ATX cases. The 12-year-old Quad G5 I'm typing this on would mop the floor with one of those. This isn't a slam on the Amiga community, who tried hard to bring in systems at not-completely-eyewatering prices, but this ends up producing boutique systems running underwhelming chips in unimaginative designs because of the small numbers and the rigid price points. More to the point, I don't have a strong Amiga history, so the AmigaOS side of those machines would be mostly wasted on me.
If there's going to be an architectural alternative in the grunt ballpark with x86, and I don't think ARM has gotten there yet, right now it's going to be Power ISA. And everyone in this thread complains about the cost. Understandable, but if no one steps up and buys one, no one will make any more of them and they will never achieve the necessary economies of scale. Fortunately I'm a PPC bigot^Wzealot with more money than sense. So I'll take the plunge. :)
The fact the firmware is auditable, no management engine/PSP crap, I get full schematics, etc., is just a bonus in my view.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#143I'm really excited to get my Talos finally in my hands (was one of the early orders). Good to see Tim Pearson and the demo system. I'm very hopeful the wait will be over soon.
Please let us know your experience with the Talos system.
I'll definitely be posting unboxing, tests, progress reports, etc., to the TenFourFox Development blog.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#144Heard that Google has all their services ready to go on Power just needed to flip a switch.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are still useful though. If you want to build an 7-node cluster of 2GB nodes on a single Mini ITX motherboard, it's even cheap. And requires no messy cables. https://www.pine64.org/?product=clusterboard-with-7-module-s... and seven https://www.pine64.org/?product=sopine-a64
Those SBCs are still stuck with using very outdated SoCs usually with a quadcore A53. Even a 7 node cluster of SOPINEs is going to be slower than an iPhone X.
That's not the point. The point is that it's a cluster of network-connected nodes that can run something like Kubernetes.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#146Earlier 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…
"Orders of magnitude" is implausible, and certainly not supported by published STREAM results for POWER8, even excluding HBM in Knights Landing, for instance. I'd love to see some actual performance figures for POWER9, though, or even facts about its SIMD, in particular.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tr…
It's true that raw FP performance isn't the be-all and end-all, but things aren't necessarily memory-bound either. HPC codes at scale are often dominated by communication.
I'm surprised if numerical issues are that much of a worry. x86 has now caught up in doing FMA, in particular. I don't know what the build systems actually are, but most of Fedora (and Debian?) is available for POWER, and will typically have at least minimal tests in the package. It's not as if POWER is new for HPC; the Daresbury HPC-X machine was quite high in the top500 15 years or so ago, as an example I was physically close to.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#148Earlier 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 ).
For ARM, specifically, look out Simon Macintosh-Smith's preliminary results for the Isambard system.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but most of the compute for Summit and Sierra is in the GPUs. I haven't seen and indication that even those actually have POWER9 yet.
Re: Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new summit supercomputer uses power9. The reason nobody used it before was there was no server processor available.
Yes, but most of the compute for Summit and Sierra is in the GPUs. I haven't seen and indication that even those actually have POWER9 yet.
They do, and they run many CPU-only applications that will run on the power. See the talks at gtc.