Comment by shaklee3
7 years ago
I've followed POWER for a while now, and it seems to be mostly marketing hype. The POWER8 was not much better than the Xeons out, and had almost no availability. POWER9 excels at a lot of IO-bound tasks, but again, it's nearly impossible to find. It doesn't help that there are very few systems you can buy out there. On paper, the POWER9 looks awesome. Then you look closer at the actual architecture and realize that a lot of pieces of the design are weird and/or seem somewhat useless. It also doesn't help that they're extremely expensive, especially since there are so few options.
So while I'd like IBM to compete with Intel, they need to pony up more money if they really want to push the industry. Don't make it so hard to buy one, and publish benchmarks/comparisons with Intel.
Based on your subcomment about evaluation, I'm very interested to hear your opinions about Talos' offerings - up to now I've only heard anecdotes from individuals drinking the security+ownership kool-aid.
What IBM offers is probably a lot more coherent and takes better advantage of what the POWER architecture has to offer, such as larger quantities of RAM, the per-node interconnect fabric, faster I/O (not just PCIe), etc (admittedly totally naive here). Plus of course there's z/OS, which I know enough about to respect (and want to play with someday :) ).
Talos basically offers only Linux and a mildly DIY standing-up experience (https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-rap...), although this is likely to be reasonably painless for non-desktop configurations (and perhaps volume orders can come preconfigured).
As a bit of a pet idea I kind of want to colocate one of the 2U or 4U systems for generic web serving and similar duties, but I fear that running a blog/discussion system on such a machine may result in a constant effort (on my part) at keeping discussion focused on the "it's a different architecture, what comp-sci interesting things can we do with it" aspect instead of getting distracted by shallow OCD-meta-security bikeshedding.
(It's kind of sad that the collective consensus about new/different architectures has to always be about security nowadays, and not about unbiased exploration, which is what we're best at)
My impression is that POWER is more suitable for certain types of scientific computation that require high degrees of precision rather than for general purpose enterprise use. POWER9 is the only CPU architecture out there that has support for quad-precision floats. Alas, no CPU exists with support for octuple floats, since only astrophysicists need that level of precision.
Right, and that's what we were evaluating it for. It's also the only one with pcie4, 8 memory channels, and CAPI. Nonetheless, it needs software and libraries to be updated to use some of these, and in many cases, they're not.