151–156 of 156 posts
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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.
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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…
It seems I have close to no experience with POWER (other than older Macs), so, I am a bit concerned about what I will and won't be able to do on it.
When I receive mine I hope to be able to use it for most things, but as a fall back it should be able to be used for some self hosting.
Any particular place POWER guys hang out? I haven't been able to find a community that talks about day to day off x86 (albeit I haven't done much looking).
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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…
What is the maximum dollar amount that you would be willing to pay? Remember, it's never going to be the same price as a RPi.
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The mobo+single quad core CPU is $2,475, that's way more than the threadripper setup and the threadripper has 4x the core count.
Threadripper also only has 8MB of L3 cache per CCX, and you can't hold more than 8MB of data. (true, there are 4x CCX per chip, but you can't "combine" the datasets. You're effectively limited to 8MB per 4-cores. To communicate cross-CCX requires an expensive ping to main-memory) Its a great architecture, but cross-CCX communication is relatively slow and definitely is a concern for some work problems. Power9 has 120…
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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.
In regards to cores, the distinction is between the PowerVM and Linux (OpenPOWER/PowerNV) ecosystem variants. Both are made to process 96 threads, but the difference is in whether the thread processing units are grouped eight to a core (SMT8) or four to a core (SMT4).
The PowerVM version, some say for licensing reasons, gets the SMT8 cores. Either way, you get 96 threads:
12 cores * SMT8 = 96 threads 24 cores * SMT4 = 96 threads
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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.
IBM has extremely flexible hardware which, using IBM's hypervisor, can be configured on the fly to present itself in a number of different ways. For example: few powerful compute units, many medium compute units, or very many less capable compute units.
So right up front the idea (which a lot of people might assume without really thinking about) that a given chip has a fixed number of "cores" doesn't really hold true. More to the point the next question that presents itself "what makes up for a core and what determines how many a given processor has" is best answered with "it depends" (at least as far as IBM Power goes).
One of the main reasons this matters is that all sorts of businesses use the idea of "cores" as a fixed entity as part of their pricing structures... and now it's all muddied.