Patching POWER for Spectre/Meltdown was a pain but we are done with it. You have to apply patches to the LPAR/OS, VIOS and firmware. IBM has acknowledged that there will be a performance hit but have not provided any quantified numbers that I have seen so far.
https://ibm.biz/BdZjPy "All POWER8 and POWER9 results in this table reflect performance with firmware and Operating System updates to mitigate Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures issue numbers ... known as Spectre and Meltdown"
Thanks.
I also just found the rPerf and CPW consolidated spreadsheet from IBM (including pre and post Spectre/Meltdown numbers).
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.
Please let us know your experience with the Talos system.
IBM already released patches for this, at least for POWER7+. Interestingly the Meltdown issue seems "only" to affect the L1 cache, so L2 does not need to be evicted. Raptor says all Talos systems will be patched prior to shipping. https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Speculative_Execution_Vulnera...
Patching POWER for Spectre/Meltdown was a pain but we are done with it. You have to apply patches to the LPAR/OS, VIOS and firmware. IBM has acknowledged that there will be a performance hit but have not provided any quantified numbers that I have seen so far.
How did you verify if the patched system is not affected anymore? I'm really curious what means the users have to verify the effectiveness of such patches.
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.
At the same time, you need mindshare at the lower end to drive demand for the high end. I previously developed for POWER by getting an Apple Mac Mini. Very affordable, and while not a full POWER instruction set was sufficient to test and validate my code. Today, there is no equivalent, and I'm about to dispose of the Mini. I couldn't justify use of POWER today even though we have a datacentre stuffed full of machines for HPC, and could likely make use of it. We have zero experience with it, and no easy way to get any experience. Being able to buy a cheap low-end system for experimentation is important. If I wanted to do this for ARM, I could buy half a dozen cheap boards online this morning and have them delivered by Monday. But POWER is out of reach.
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.
If the hardware is good enough, someone will write a JVM for it that's competitive. As the other respondent notes, IBM can do it themselves.
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.
> Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? A. Many of the people who today specify datacenter hardware came into that career as enthusiasts (aka "early adopters") and are more comfortable recommending what they have experience with. B. Enthusiasts bring the consumer volume that drives down production cost. This is a necessary driver of Moore's law.
I'm pretty sure that the major Datacenter operators run quantitative analyses on all possible candidate chips. There aren't that many.
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…
We (Oregon State University Open Source Lab) have been working with IBM for the last few years to help with this problem. We host a set of P8 (and soon P9) machines for them so FOSS projects can work on porting issues. You're welcome to sign up if you're interested [1]. [1] http://osuosl.org/services/powerdev/
ARM dev boards are generally based on toy-sized SoCs, though.
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.