Mono on AIX and IBM i

I actually have an Excel spreadsheet open right now with some preliminary numbers (evaluating some random specs from a recent Anandtech article, along with Sforza CPUs, out of curiosity), and in terms of $/thread, the Sforza CP9M06, an 8-core 4SMT chip for $600, is only beaten in $/thread by a Cavium ThunderX2 9980-2200, at $18.5/core vs $14.02/core, thanks to 128 threads. But, at a price of $1,800, with a significantly lower base/turbo clock frequency (3.5GHz+ vs 2.2+) and less than 1/2th the L3 cache.

Granted, these numbers are more or less impossible to verify at this moment and unbelievably fuzzy, and it's incomplete without filling in all the data on a wider array of Xeons, EPYC machines, and real benchmarks. But the back of the envelope numbers come off as pretty solid, and my experience with POWER8 makes me think these machines will perform very well.

There is also the fact that IBM is quite open about POWER this time around, all the way to making all their firmware/boot/BMC code open, and encouraging patches, under FOSS licenses, and making all the architecture/firmware documentation freely available. Might not matter for hyperscale data centers that negotiate themselves, but certainly a nice bonus.

The biggest price-related barrier at the low end is really the cost of the mobos, though. That's where most of the TALOS II's price goes to. The CPUs are relatively cheap in comparison.

I looked into doing this briefly, and a couple blockers were that I couldn't find any easy cloud services offering POWER that I could use for testing, the cheapest dev system I could find, the Talos II Development System, is itself $5000 once you add RAM and storage (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2DS1/intro.html, they do have a cheaper system available in pre-order: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html), and the C intrinsics that they offer work with special overloaded functions with a vector type extension to C, making it a lot harder to use the approach of just offering wrappers for basic intrinsics and then working on higher-level support on top of that.

Looks like gnzlbg put more effort into it, but ran into similar issues: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/42743#issuecomment-...

Power certainly exists, its just less popular. The above board is under $250 and seems to be good enough for tinkering usage.

Software support is certainly weaker. I think Power9 primarily exists for people who are planning to write their own application servers, or otherwise are willing to spend time recompiling OSS over to the Power9 architecture (Gentoo style or similar).

A "real" server application will want to buy a Talos II Workstation, for $3000+. If you're worried about performance, you have to develop and test on the big stuff.

If you're planning on a high-performance database optimizations (ie: lets say you wanted to improve PostgreSQL's performance), you wouldn't test on a Rasp. Pi or Intel i7. You'd buy a Thunderx2 ARM, Intel Gold, or AMD EPYC to test on. The architecture of "big boy" chips is grossly different than the smaller scale stuff.

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And the way you "test" on big-boy machines, is through cloud services. You don't necessarily have to buy a full machine if you're testing (although local access is certainly useful).

Do you develop for AIX and IBM i for work and have access to hardware and inspiration to do this for that reason? If not, how did you wind up picking this as a hobbyist endeavor?