
Power 9 May Dent X86 Servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent Test IBM Systems - bcaulfield
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333090
======
Twirrim
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 hourly fee. You have to pay for a full month, which starts out at
around $1000.

There are very few individuals that would be willing to make such a
commitment, but so many that would be willing to spend a few tens of dollars
on spinning up a VM for a few hours to see if it provides value.

If you want people to get excited about it, or interested in using it, you
_really_ need to make it easy for people to test it on a small scale.

~~~
newman314
So...

I sit on the POWER Customer Advisory Board, what you have raised has certainly
been something I've told IBM multiple times over the last few meetings I've
had with them.

I plan to continue pushing on this front.

~~~
ethbro
From IBM's history, I'd assume this is chalked up to IBM institutional inertia
(enterprise customers make big deployments, nothing else matters) than
willfully doing it for some other profit-oriented purpose?

~~~
newman314
There are NDA items I can't get into but certainly it's not the case where
I've just been shouting into the wind.

------
blattimwind
~Literally the exact same headline in 2015 with POWER8, no results then,
(probably no results this time).

I guess this is pretty much all just leverage to hold into Intel's face to get
better prices out of them. "Look, we could _totally_ convert to POWER..."

------
walrus01
I will believe it when I can pull out my visa card, go to some online stores
(such as those that resell Supermicro, Tyan, MSI, Quanta, etc), buy a Power9
capable ATX motherboard from one of the top-ten taiwanese motherboard
manufacturers for $350, put a $300 CPU in it, $300 to $400 of RAM and build a
1U server with it. Until that happens it will not get into the hands of enough
developers/sysadmin/devops/engineers to matter.

------
matt_wulfeck
> _Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other
> standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50%_

Glad to see them throwing in the towel on a pricey and proprietary component.
Competition is good.

~~~
hinkley
Didn’t IBM make _exactly_ this same mistake thirty five years ago with PCs??

~~~
wmf
Which mistake exactly? Note that the Power9 processor itself is single-sourced
from IBM so they don't have to worry about clones.

------
Cyberdog
Print version to avoid unnecessary pager:
[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333090&print=ye...](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333090&print=yes)

------
classichasclass
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.

~~~
reirob
Please let us know your experience with the Talos system.

~~~
classichasclass
I'll definitely be posting unboxing, tests, progress reports, etc., to the
TenFourFox Development blog.

~~~
reirob
That's great! Thank you already in advance! I am playing with the idea to get
a TalosII computer. But so far I didn't find much experience reports from
users and on top, on the [https://raptorcs.com/](https://raptorcs.com/) they
are only on pre-order.

------
api
That would be nice, but the problem with these systems historically is that
they're ridiculously expensive compared to x64 servers for the end user. As a
result end users and SMBs never get their hands on them and nobody develops
anything for them or supports them.

~~~
pm90
which is why they're not being sold directly to enterprises but to Cloud
Providers. I'm not a hardware engineer so not familiar with the fine print but
what I've read so far seems to suggest that Power systems are more efficient
at running Database-centric workloads and the power hypervisor is an order of
magnitude more efficient than intel ones
[http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Intel-x86-and-IBM-
POWE...](http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Intel-x86-and-IBM-POWER-CPUs-
Which-When-Why).

Disclosure: I work on IBM cloud, but only tangentially with the Power systems.

~~~
hsivonen
Is there a cloud provider that allows a EU-based natural-person customer buy a
little Power 9 time for testing?

Last I looked, Power cloud offerings required the customer to be a big company
that buys a lot of compute.

~~~
greglindahl
I think IBM Softlayer has been renting out small numbers of Power-based
machines for a while now, enough to test with.

~~~
pm90
Correct! They rent out POWER8 systems: [https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-
servers/power](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/power). POWER9
systems don't seem to be available (yet).

As for the future, I can't say much publicly (le sigh) but let me just say
that personally I think future of power is bright, especially with cloud
providers.

------
myrandomcomment
This is only good. Everyone is arguing here about stuff that really does not
matter if this move the needle forward.

x64 by AMD pushed Intel to do better. Things became faster / cheaper. AMD fell
behind and Intel rested and priced for high end went up. AMD released Ryzen
and all of the sudden we see movement from Intel again. ARM on the low end
pushed Intel to look at their lower powered chips and try to do better. IBM
pushing P9 to win at the top at a reason price point pushed on AMD and Intel.
Competition is only good here and brings value to all of us.

All of this is only good.

------
quillo
I have a serious bee in my bonnet about POWER9.

The architecture was something I was very excited about for low latency
workloads; it seemed that only thing stopping IBM from overtaking x86 in this
space was the actual availability of hardware. POWER9 has been "in the works"
for, what, two years now [1]? Google have been running POWER9 internally for
at least 12 months [2], and IBM seem to have been caught up in the AI hype
train by pivoting the POWER9 to some kind of "AI processing system" [3].

Had the P9 been released before Skylake, it might have been successful. By the
time it is GA, it will be competing with x86 chips two generations higher than
were available at the original P9 announcements and SPECInt benchmarks.

This has been made even more frustrating by the fact that Oracle effectively
killed off SPARC during this time. Perhaps Fujitsu will continue to run with
it, but I think it's fair to say that development will stagnate and support
will dwindle as it is increasingly obscure and niche architecture.

[1] [https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-
po...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-power9/)

[2] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-
Zai...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zaius-Google-
and-Rackspaces-open-server-running-IBM-POWER9.html)

[3]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-i...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-
ibm-launched-instead-of-power9/)

------
bluedino
I can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely.

Google, on the other hand would need a reason to switch. Somewhere there's a
spreadsheet with a number for energy cost savings that would make it worth it
for Google to switch architectures. I've heard it's as low as 10%.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> I can see China running with ARM and POWER, ditching Intel entirely.

China has Zhaoxin, which develops domestic x86-compatible cores that have
received massive state funding, despite little commercial success. They way it
looks, I think that China has decided to stick with x86, with Zhaoxin as an
"escape valve" for the case where chip supply from Intel and AMD gets
threatened.

~~~
na85
If I were China I'd be cultivating a friendly chip fab for my high assurance
platforms. There's no way China trusts Intel or AMD chips for classified
processing.

------
sargun
I think the formula is simple — if the amount of idle developer time waiting
for development gear + the cost of development gear + the cost of porting your
software to POWER > the potential cost saving of POWER, don’t touch it.

If POWER unlocks something fundamentally new and historically impossible on
X86, like ARM unlocked cell phones, and such, maybe that’s another reason to
try it.

At the end of the day, nobody got fired for choosing x86. Its well understood,
it’s cheap, development tools are accessible, and it works.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Similar discussion with POWER8 from 2015
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519548)

------
shrumm
From what I’ve read, POWER was affected by spectre/ meltdown too. However,
Intels initial response to play down it’s significance can’t have gone well
with large enterprise customers. In addition to the performance boosts the
article refers to, I wonder how much of an impact the recent kerfuffle over
Intels response had on POWER demand.

~~~
classichasclass
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...](https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Speculative_Execution_Vulnerabilities_of_2018)

~~~
newman314
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.

~~~
hindsightbias
[https://ibm.biz/BdZjPy](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"

~~~
newman314
Thanks.

I also just found the rPerf and CPW consolidated spreadsheet from IBM
(including pre and post Spectre/Meltdown numbers).

[https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/files/basic/ano...](https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/files/basic/anonymous/api/library/91037d4b-518a-4662-8832-0049a2d2563c/document/4c46604b-c783-4843-86d7-c34a8dbe0bc0/media)

------
stonogo
Amazing how nobody talks about POWER unless they're in the middle of an IBM
trade show (in this case, THINK2018).

------
hindsightbias
[https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-
resources/](https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/)

------
euyyn
"Power 9 may dent x86 servers: Alibaba, Google, Tencent test IBM systems"

For those like me whose comprehension was hindered by all the upper casing.

------
snvzz
It's not RISC-V. They want you to adopt some exotic, proprietary ISA. And
they've forever been doing a poor job of it.

Not a chance.

------
jacksmith21006
Heard that Google has all their services ready to go on Power just needed to
flip a switch.

------
mrbill
I don't ever see P9 getting price-competitive with x86 or ARM.

------
joebergeron
Is "Power 9" purposefully a Magic reference? Or just a coincidence?

~~~
Twirrim
The CPU architecture has been called POWER since 1990, and this is the 9th
generation of it, hence POWER9.

MtG didn't come out until 1993. So yes, it's a co-incidence.

~~~
Nomentatus
Or causation in the other direction.

------
Thaxll
Code running on Intel proc is much faster than anything else, I'm not sure how
long it would take to catch up with the performance they provide.

~~~
floren
Do you have actual benchmarks of x86 vs. Power 9 or are you just talking out
your ass?

~~~
berkut
For well-optimised floating point calculations, this is generally true (even
taking into account the SMT capabilities of Power8). Intel also has 8-wide
(and more) SIMD in terms of intrinsics (AVX/AVX512), whilst Power is still
limited to 4-wide with AltiVec, although with Power9 VSX should allow wider (I
think).

Where Power8/9 _really_ shines is memory bandwidth - it's orders of magnitude
faster than leading edge Intel stuff currently. But if you're not memory
constrained, Intel machines can still have a bit of an edge.

~~~
philipkglass
_Where Power8 /9 really shines is memory bandwidth - it's orders of magnitude
faster than leading edge Intel stuff currently. But if you're not memory
constrained, Intel machines can still have a bit of an edge._

That makes Power sound very appealing. I've never met a real life scientific
simulation that _wasn 't_ often constrained by memory bandwidth. I'm sure they
exist, but they aren't all that plentiful. I'd love to try running the code
that matters to me on Power. (For one thing, I don't even know if it would
pass basic regression tests; numerical code is touchy. Are gcc/gfortran
reliably adequate on Power like they are on x64?) Unfortunately, as everyone
else is commenting, entry level x64 is dirt cheap and entry level Power isn't.

~~~
classichasclass
gcc is perfectly cromulent on Power (speaking from experience with my own
PowerPC and POWER6 systems, and when I had time on one of Raptor's POWER8
systems). The speed differential between that and IBM xlc is pretty small IME
nowadays, too.

I'm more hesitant to say the same about clang/llvm but it's been awhile and
I'm probably not current.

