Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talos II

raptorcs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 110 posts

Re: Talos II

#71

Post by Symmetry »

ju-st wrote: post #12
gbrown_ wrote: post #11

Only 4 core CPUs, a tad disappointing.

What is their performance?

IIRC they're a bit better than an Intel core on a single threaded load with some variance depending on the workload. But going from 1 to 2 threads per core increases the Power 9's throughput by 80% instead of the 20% you expect with an Intel core. And you can go up to 8 threads per core for something like 120% the total throughput of 1 thread. All those numbers for threads per core are also highly workload dependent. The more cache misses the more SMT helps.

Re: Talos II

#72

Post by hsivonen »

jabl wrote: post #31
cat199 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything worked. The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly. Also to check into are some languag…

Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode. That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.

In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time.

If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations.

It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.

Re: Talos II

#73

Post by yellowapple »

arca_vorago wrote: post #10

I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming de…

Most things should be similar. Proprietary drivers (like for graphics cards) obviously won't work (though the firmware should, I reckon, since that's independent of the host CPU). Proprietary software in general probably won't work unless you can convince the vendor to ship a POWER build. Even some FOSS might not work fully (or even at all) if it relies too much on specific architectures (in particular, I know V8 - and therefore both Chromium and Node.js - only very recently got POWER ports).

I personally run OpenBSD on all my (Apple) PowerPC hardware; it seems to work a lot more reliably than the Linux distros I've tried (in particular, I remember the install process for Debian being rather painful on PowerPC due to OpenFirmware, while OpenBSD is just as easy as it is on x86: mash the Enter key until you have a working system; at most, I sometimes need to tweak some boot settings at the OF prompt, namely if it was previously running OS X).

Re: Talos II

#74

Post by sctb »

pedrocr wrote: post #60
sctb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956811 and marked it off-topic.

This is quite surprising. I assume you mean it's offtopic for this particular discussion and not offtopic for HN in general right? Even so it seems strange to shut off a discussion like that just because it started from a tangent of a topic. What's the benefit? Edit: there are also 2 other sibling comments that are about the same topic and left behind.

The discussion isn't shut off, it's just that users shouldn't have to scroll through a long digression about credit cards at the top of a thread about the Talos.

Re: Talos II

#75

Post by pedrocr »

sctb wrote: post #74
pedrocr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite surprising. I assume you mean it's offtopic for this particular discussion and not offtopic for HN in general right? Even so it seems strange to shut off a discussion like that just because it started from a tangent of a topic. What's the benefit? Edit: there are also 2 other sibling comments that are about the same topic and left behind.

The discussion isn't shut off, it's just that users shouldn't have to scroll through a long digression about credit cards at the top of a thread about the Talos.

The context of the original comment gets lost and the [-] functionality makes skipping subthreads easy enough so I don't see the advantage.

Re: Talos II

#76

Post by pedrocr »

lmm wrote: post #69
madez wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're paying cash. That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer shops that don't.

Remember cash isn't free either - armoured cars and the like cost money, I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up being more costly than card fees. I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't support.

>I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up being more costly than card fees.

This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.

Re: Talos II

#77

Post by CrystalGamma »

danpalmer wrote: post #63
Kiro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this. Why would that be the only option? Never seen a shop accept credit cards only. I only have a debit card and have never had any problems.

I think this is a common misunderstanding. The US seems to use "credit card" to refer to all payment cards, but is rarely limit to just _credit_ cards. I think the distinction between credit and debit cards is more commonly made in Europe.

I mostly mean that I don't have a card that can be used for payment over the usual networks like MasterCard (unless those “Maestro”-cards do work, which I doubt), Visa or AmEx …

Re: Talos II

#78

Post by CrystalGamma »

hsivonen wrote: post #72
jabl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode. That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.

In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time. If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optim…

They're already scaling down … in the POWER8 Talos campaign, the cheapest CPU option was something like $1300, the CPU they're offering here is only $300. And the board, because you don't need expensive memory buffer chips anymore, is almost half the price as then.

Re: Talos II

#79

Post by CrystalGamma »

qubex wrote: post #38

Despite the high cost (when compared to 'comparable' x86_64 hardware) I am very excited by this. However I'm concerned by desktop Linux support and graphics driver support. It would be really miserable to get this kind of machine and then have a lacklustre desktop experience (though I'd be using it as a high-horsepower workstation, it would need to be able to dump computations onto the GPU and use ordinary free produ…

Given that they're selling systems with AMD cards in them, I would imagine that AMDGPU/RadeonSI at least would very well.

Re: Talos II

#80

Post by CrystalGamma »

pedrocr wrote: post #65
madez wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lastschrift works fine for me.

And you can use that to buy goods online? Direct debit is usually used for recurrent billing. In Portugal there's a way to use a similar system for online purchases by generating a code that you then have to use in an ATM or online banking. It makes for a pretty poor customer experience when purchasing and I doubt it's actually cheaper these days than debit/credit payment processing.

Amazon certainly accepts payments that way. And many other online retailers offer GiroPay, which I think is a payment method based on SEPA Credit Transfer. I don't know about the cost structure of that one.
Post reply on HN