

IBM Opens Power Microprocessor Architecture - kjhughes
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/ibm-opens-chip-architecture-in-strategy-of-sharing-and-self-interest/

======
mabhatter
This sucks.

It means IBM doesn't want to do HARD engineering anymore. They just want to do
sales and handling of stuff for high markup. This is the last really cool
thing to go before the finish dismantling that former technical giant.

POWER was never about flops/watt it was about the IBM ecosystem. It's calling
in for support on your hardware/software and getting elevated to somebody in
the same department that will actually write the fix. It's having actual field
engineers that went to the factory and learned how the stuff is put together.
It was never cheap... But it was good.

ibm's POWER hardware is the last of the "old iron" lines. X86 stuff just
doesn't hold a candle in the "well built" category. My company went from an
"open platform" IBM solution back to old fashioned POWER hardware because it
was just better built and the "open" platform just resulted in finger pointing
between BLADE, SAN, LAN, and OS people... And that was IBM support with their
name on the box.. When it's truly mixed support it's going to be very
terrible.

It's not like AIX or System i will ever get ported to non-IBM machines for
better value. It's not like Apple is gonna dust off OSX and let me build racks
of POWER servers either. Betting on "Linux" is a cop out. People use Linux on
POWER when they have investments in POWER iron for their mainline business
apps.. ROG, COBOL, etc.. And they don't want to pay AIX/enterprise licensing
for web/email servers.

This is just the "last call" to show they tried to let the world love them
more... And nobody will come. Then they close it down.

------
hapless
A particularly desperate move from IBM.

This is uncomfortably close to SPARC's story. Sun opened up SPARC designs in
2005. Four years later, the "Rock" project was canceled, marking an end for
world-beating SPARC performance.

(Later Sun/Oracle chips have all been based on "Niagara," a low-end chip that
didn't even hope to compete on performance. It was intended to be massively
multicore and inexpensive, and it was at least one of those things.)

~~~
binarycrusader
I think your conclusion, "end for world-beating SPARC performance", is perhaps
based on out of date information:

[http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-
scalability/s...](http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/performance-
scalability/sun-sparc-enterprise-t-servers-078532.html)

Also, if you look at the roadmap, you'll see there's even more performance
improvements scheduled in the near future:

[http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-
storage/servers/sp...](http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-
storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf)

~~~
hapless
Oracle's current chips are derived from the massively-multicore Niagara, not
from Rock or UltraSPARC III/IV. As a result, you might notice that the
benchmarks Oracle brags about are SPECjbb and TPC-C. These are benchmarks that
reward integer perf and parallelism, not single-thread or floating-point
performance.

On SPEC's general purpose benchmark, SPECcpu, Oracle published only three
SPARC results. All three are from Fujitsu chips in re-branded Fujitsu systems.
Oracle just doesn't publish results for their in-house chips. I imagine they
ran the benchmarks and decided the poor results did not fit their marketing
message.

[http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html](http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html)

~~~
binarycrusader
Oracle has actually published other SPARC results that are not for Fujitsu
chips for SPEC CPU:

[https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_sp...](https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20130326_sparc_t5_speccpu2006_rate)

[http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html](http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html)

While I can't provide you my own detailed benchmarks, I can tell you
anecdotally that the most recent SPARC hardware has significantly better
single-threaded performance than the early T1, T2 series.

As an example, one of the projects I work on is written almost entirely in
Python, and so is almost completely single-threaded (only the transport is
multi-threaded using libcurl).

I had an opportunity to compare the performance on the T5 to the T1 and found
it was practically night and day, and the performance of the program seems
just as snappy as it does on any Xeon system I've used.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that given a choice between a fully-loaded Xeon
box or one of the newest SPARC servers, most of the developers I work with
will choose the SPARC server simply because builds take significantly less
time.

~~~
hapless
Those are the SPECint_rate benchmarks, for throughput. These are different
from the regular SPECint, and they're published separately. Oracle has
published no regular SPECcpu scores.

Even the rate benchmarks are not very impressive. Oracle rigged the comparison
in their press release. They compare a 16-core SPARC to an 8-core Intel. If we
do apples-to-apples, the Oracle result is pretty humdrum:

\- Oracle T5-1B, 16-core SPARC, 436 / 467

\- Dell M520, 16-core Intel, 533 / 553

The M520 contains 2x E5-2450@2.1 GHz. This is far from the fastest Intel chip.
You can get them up to 3.6 GHz. It's just a common and inexpensive
configuration. Let's not even talk about the respective pricing.

Personally, I haven't used anything newer than a T1. Because I haven't seen
anyone buy a new Sun box in that long!

~~~
userbinator
If you normalise the SPEC results to per-thread per-clock, you get:

\- SPARC T5, 128 threads @ 3.6GHz, 463 / 467 -> 1.01 / 0.946 result/thread/GHz

\- Intel Xeon E5-2690, 16 threads @ 2.9GHz, 357 / 343 -> 7.69 / 7.39
result/thread/GHz

Or to put it another way, the SPARC needs 800% more threads and a 24% higher
clock to achieve only ~30% faster than the Intel. The POWER is somewhat, but
not that much better, at 2.54 / 2.24.

~~~
hapless
The Intel chip, as benchmarked, is 2.1 GHz. The same design is available in
3.6 GHz, as of Q2 '12\. We're comparing a top-clocked, circa 2013 SPARC to a
2012 Intel product running at 60% of the commercially available clock rate,
and the SPARC comes up short.

I used this poor comparison because that was what was readily available in
SPEC's published results for single-processor (SPECcpu) and parallel
(SPECcpu_rate) benchmarks.

------
rwmj
This is not actually "open" as in free and open source software.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation)

~~~
tormeh
That's what we really need: An ISA with a GPL-style copyleft licence. Not that
being Intel's competitor is all that profitable, but the x86 market would
probably be more diverse if everyone could use the ISA.

~~~
rbanffy
If we are really talking about free and open-source software, the ISA is
irrelevant. Over the years, I've used Emacs on Alpha, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER,
MIPS, ARM and x86 under at least six different operating systems and it works
flawlessly on all of them. I never had the chance to confirm that, but I
suspect it works very well on IBM zSeries mainframes too.

~~~
hga
Serious question: can the zSeries do full-duplex terminal communications or
the modern equivalent?

I first started using EMACS shortly after various IBM systems, and it's hard
to express how obnoxious it was to have your keyboard lock while the computer
was sending you stuff....

The question is serious because it's not clear to me the use cases of the
zSeries including supporting this sort of thing (vs. editing your files on
another computer like your PC before submitting them to the mainframe ... but
I haven't touched anything in that domain since ... 1978 I think).

~~~
kev009
You can just SSH into a modern z. It has a full POSIX environment, so you
could run real EMACS.

[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/features/unix/library/IBM+Redbooks/index.html#emacs)

[http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=...](http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r11.bpxa400/cle.htm)

------
matthewmacleod
For better or worse, the ISA wars are in one sense over. There's relatively
little benefit to be gained from using an architecture other than amd64 or ARM
at this point; silicon has evolved to the point were the line between RISC and
CISC is pretty much nonexistent, save for some minor benefits around code
density etc. The benefits of using amd64 are beyond-compare experience of
optimisation, commodity pricing, and legacy compatibility; the costs are
negligible.

However, I'm somewhat uncomfortable with Intel's increasing and complete near-
domination of the "not-low-power" CPU market. I'd love to see other high-end
silicon designers start to develop amd64-compatible processors that will
encourage competition in the market. AMD's struggling with it, but there's
plenty of scope for looking at interesting approaches to increasing
performance or reducing power use.

~~~
willvarfar
(Mill mod)

 _Ahem_ , sorry to those suffering Mill Fatigue on HN, but any conversation
about the ISA wars being over is a red rag to a bull with us! :)

Hope you like the talks on
[http://millcomputing.com/docs](http://millcomputing.com/docs)

NOTE: bulls react to movement not colour

~~~
matthewmacleod
Apologies, I shouldn't have been quite so dismissive.

I mean that the ISA wars are over in the sense of multiple relatively similar
architectures competing against one another for negligible gain.

There's still plenty of scope for nontraditional architectures to come in and
offer something different. We've already seen that in the more general
availability of general-purpose GPU programming. As an architecture nerd, I'm
already super-excited by Mill.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, thinking about it, many of the old UNIX workstation vendors used the same
68K CPUs but then they decided to develop their own RISC architectures,
fragmenting the market and reducing the economies of scale.

~~~
hga
Well, it's hard to say that Motorola had it's heart in the 68K CPUs, it was a
wildly diversified and not entirely focused electronics conglomerate back
then.

And their product plan was very conservative, with the "odd numbered" chips
not being great advances on the even numbered ones, e.g. the 68030, which came
out the same time as the first SPARC, used the 68020 microarchitecture with a
256 byte instruction cache and used the design shrink to put the MMU on the
chip (but not the FPU). The 68040, three years later, wasn't a stunning
success, was it? And the 88100, which came out a year after the 68020
certainly sucked up a lot of corporate oxygen, not to mention put into
question the company's commitment to the 68K family.

And it's very dangerous for a company to depend on another company for one of
the most critical components of its products, isn't it?

But, yeah, the economies of scale, the much lower unit sales to spread your
Non-Recurring Engineering costs over, eventually doomed them to mostly
bureaucratic and installed base niches when AMD successfully innovated for a
short period and then Intel got its act together due to that threat.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, I know the 68040 was late. On the other hand, not having SPARC for
example would have been less competition for HP etc to deal with, making this
less of a problem.

~~~
hga
Which does a good job of proving my case. SUN very much didn't want to provide
"less completion for HP" (albeit I very seldom heard a good word for HP-UX).

~~~
yuhong
And my point is that in the long term this was probably a bad idea.

~~~
hga
Indeed, and it's something I've been thinking about if I were in charge of
Symbolics at the beginning.

But it's also in part 20/20 hindsight, e.g.:

Lots of people refused to believe that Moore's Law would last as long as it
has; the corollary that you'd get higher speeds purely from design shrinks
_did_ end about a decade ago.

I'm not sure very many people "got" the Clayton Christensen _The Innovator 's
Dilemma_ disruptive innovation thesis prior to his publishing the book in
1997. He really put it all together, how companies with initially cruddy
products could in due course destroy you seemingly overnight.

In this case, how a manufacturer of rather awful CPUs (the 286 in particular,
but the 8086/8 was no price except in cost; caveat, Intel support to people
who design in their chips was stellar back then), could start getting its act
together in a big way in 1985 with the 386, then seriously crack their CISC
limitations with P6 microarchitecture (Pentium Pro), etc.

And note their RISC flirtation with the i860 in 1989, their Itanium debacle,
etc. etc. More than a few companies would have committed suicide before
swallowing their pride and adopting their downmarket, copycat's 64 bit
macroarchitecture that competed with the official 64 bit one.

And that's not even getting into all the mistakes they made with memory
systems, million part recalls on the eave of OEM shipments, etc. What allowed
Intel to win? Superb manufacturing, and massive Wintel sales, I think.

------
mindcrime
I keep hearing "IBM is opening POWER", but I still don't see any obvious route
to dial up Asus or Tyan and order a cheap ATX motherboard that I can slap a
POWER processor on, and build a machine to play with. Until that day comes,
it's hard for me to get excited about POWER, as much as I might otherwise want
to.

~~~
hapless
SME (Sun MicroElectronics) did exactly this in the 1990s. You could buy a
standard ATX motherboard with an UltraSPARC II and PC DIMM slots on it. It was
called the Ultra AXmp.

Unfortunately, the internal cost structure was such that the Ultra AXmp cost
only a few percent less than a "proprietary" workstation/server from the
parent company.

The moral of the story: sticking a high-margin, low-volume chip in a commodity
board doesn't put it on a commodity cost basis.

~~~
mindcrime
Yeah, I was gonna say earlier, but got distracted... it would also help if one
could call up IBM (or a reseller) and actually buy a POWER chip - for a
reasonable price - to plug into said motherboard.

In the end, it's the entire ecosystem... it's either affordable and accessible
or it isn't. It's sad that IBM keeps coming out with pretty cool hardware
(Cell, POWER, etc.) that nobody can afford to get convenient access to. :-(

~~~
TheCondor
Alpha and sparc both had moderately affordable hardware (atx boards and such).
Outside the geeks, what's the compelling story? I owned a couple of those
devices, fact of the matter was you paid more to be on an isolated moderately
performing island. To be interesting, you need an Atx board or something with
a better chip at the same price or the whole thing has to be cheaper.
Basically, when cell came out they should have put ps3 spec workstations on
the market for $300 or maybe even less. One thing arm really does right is low
cost.

------
ausjke
the major power licensees were Freescale and AMCC, the rest is too small to be
meaningful, if any. Both Freescale and AMCC are shifting towards ARM and not
in the foundation?

With or without them, it's probably too little too late for this architecture,
sigh.

MIPS, UltraSparc, and Power, are sadly fading away.

------
dman
If they want adoption they will have to bring the price of entry level power
pc systems down.

Also wonder if its a year or two too late. AMD seems to have picked ARM as
their plan B strategy realising that competing with Intel on x86 is hard to do
with reasonable margins. Wonder if AMD would have picked POWER if it was
available as an alternative a couple of years back.

~~~
VonGuard
No, they still would have picked ARM. Why? Because every mobile device with
uptake uses ARM, and Intel has no play there.

~~~
dman
AMD is not playing in the mobile space with ARM. They realise they are not
large enough like Intel to spend their way into the ARM market. ARM is
interesting because you have Apple and Qualcomm at the high end, but you also
have Mediatek and RockChip at the low end. AMD cant play the "more value for
money" in ARM mobile that they do with x86 - because there are already people
doing it.

~~~
higherpurpose
No, but following the disruption innovation theory, ARM should soon work its
way up, while it will cannibalize Intel and force it to move increasingly
upmarket (servers, etc) to chase profits. Intel is already losing _billions_
subsidizing Atom chips [1], their "real" competitors to ARM chips, to make
them at least semi-attractive to OEMs (which will really get the short end of
the stick, if they go with Intel anyway, because if they do help Intel
succeed, Intel is going to immediately increase prices on them, to turn the
division profitable again).

ARM chips don't have to "beat" Intel. They just have to become good enough for
desktop performance, while costing much less.

[1] - [http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-
lose-1b...](http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/intel-lose-1bn-
quarter-mobile-year-2014-04/)

------
justincormack
I can't actually see anything on Tyan's site about a board. Elsewhere Google
says it is going to be cheap. But it would be nice if it was available.

------
DonGateley
That is very cool. I know that John Cocke who invented the architecture (and
was an old drinking buddy of mine) would definitely approve.

It was an outgrowth of his work developing the first optimizing compiler
(Fortran) with Fran Allen which earned him a Turing Award. Good on ya, Johh,
wherever and with whomever you might be sipping now. :-)

------
protomyth
Can someone explain Google's involvement?

~~~
wmf
Sure, the article itself can explain it: "But analysts say the embrace of
Power has two crucial advantages for Google. First, the Internet giant builds
its own data centers and tweaks the technology in its server computers, and
the licensing regime in the Power foundation is hacker-friendly in a way
Intel’s handling of its intellectual property is not. The second advantage for
Google is negotiating power..."

~~~
protomyth
I read the article and didn't find their little explanation to be that good,
that's why I asked. Why PowerPC? Why not SPARC or ARM? What got them this
involved?

~~~
erikj
PowerPC and POWER are different architectures.

~~~
protomyth
The PowerPC chips fall under the Power ISA standards documents.

------
zvrba
What can today POWER do that neither Intel nor ARM can? What is its relevance?

~~~
mabhatter
The performance is in the SYSTEM architecture. Even a mid sized POWER box can
address Hundreds of gigs of RAM, Petabytes of direct attached disk and rooms
full of tape stored data. You can make an x86 box do that, but it's not really
supported at the "plug bits and go" level. You put POWER boxes in place and
don't reboot them for years. (Unless you are smart and do your HA/DR tests
like a good kid)

For example a Google plays around with racks of disposable X86 boards like
candy. When their app becomes "fixed" rather than growing exponentially,
they'll want to move to something like POWER because it's DESIGNED to work
with dozens of CPUs sharing Petabytes of attached disk easily. Not the silly
kludges like Blades, SANS or iSCSI or virtual machines people play with now to
hide x86 OS vendor scaling limitations.

~~~
zvrba
What you're describing sounds more like a combination of better HW (bus,
components) and SW (operating system). I agree, IBM delivers superb systems.

However: are there any inherent limitations in the x64 architecture which
would make it impossible to achieve the same as with POWER, _if_ you designed
it from scratch for that kind of robustness?

------
mrweasel
I honestly thought that the Power architecture was already open. Guess not.

~~~
wmf
It's been varying degrees of open all along; there was AIM and Exponential in
the 90s and then PA Semi and AMCC ten years ago. But
marketing/branding/strategy people need to stay employed.

------
leccine
POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced Risc) is an extremely nice
architecture compare to the x86. It's firmware system was so ahead of the BIOS
disaster (EFi might change this a bit, yet). I remember loading and booting
kernels from NFS because you could load the network card drivers[1]. This is
2006, EFI was not known/used widely. The CPU itself has amazing features
too.[2]

I guess we are seeing another occurrence of Gresham's law applied to the
technical field. "Bad architecture drives out good". In this case bad is
cheaper, and this is the only thing we care about after all.

1\. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers
directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

2\.
[http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Perf...](http://www.spscicomp.org/ScicomP16/presentations/Power7_Performance_Overview.pdf)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> EFi might change this a bit, yet

As far as I can tell the only reason EFI even exists is NIH syndrome. Intel
could have just adopted OpenFirmware for x64, and they still should.

~~~
yuhong
[http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/](http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter4/firmware/)

------
frozenport
Does anybody know the architectural advantages that POWER has over x86?

~~~
wmf
Depending on what you mean by architecture, there probably aren't many. Maybe
reliability and decimal floating point. But IBM's Power server processors tend
to be bigger and higher performance than Intel's; e.g. Power8 has four times
the threads, four times the cache, and twice the memory bandwidth as Ivy
Bridge-EP.

