
Power9 to the People - ajdlinux
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/12/05/power9-to-the-people/
======
hpcjoe
The business model for these sorts of things should be "target ubiquity".
Think GPUs. Huge computational power, low cost per computational power unit.

The problem becomes that Power9 is now effectively a substrate machine for
NVidia GPUs more than it is a competitive offering by itself. In my previous
life, working on building accelerated computing platforms a decade or more
ago, some rules of thumb from customers were that they needed to see 5x at
least performance delta to justify serious consideration. And that you
couldn't charge 5x the price for that performance delta.

So if power9 is 5x the speed of a Xeon in a set of relevant test cases
(ignoring GPUs), and comparable price for a system, sure, it has a good chance
of being successful. If not, it is questionable at best.

As others have noted, cheap ... as in really dirty cheap ... development/test
boxen for devs to build at home are critical for this. Back in my SGI/Cray
days, I was advocating for, though failing to convince, management to enable
us to sell older indys, indigos, etc. with IRIX and dev bundles for home/app
dev use, at a very low price. My argument was (back then) that nothing could
touch Irix for ease of use, and that it made sense to seed developers with
this without worrying about making money on them, rather having them create
the content that people demanded, that would help us sell machines. Management
was worried it would decimate our developer revenue stream. Rather
shortsighted I think in retrospect.

Power9 looks poised to suffer the same fate, though not because of OS/compiler
costs, but because the hardware will be un-affordable for pretty much
everyone.

This is why you have to target ubiquity. You need those developers. If they
can't afford your boxes, or your stack, then you aren't going to get them.

~~~
nine_k
> _our developer revenue stream._

This sounds terrible to me. From a POV of a platform vendor, the _only_
"developer revenue stream" I'd care about would be popularity among
developers. Give away the basic tools, sell slightly more specialized tools
for the price of a pizza, get as many people hooked up as possible. Send your
machines to universities at a discount. Sell older machines to hobbyists, and
support the community. Help open-source projects run on your hardware and take
advantage of its unique features (if any).

Of course, there is a niche to actually sell top-notch enterprise-grade tools
for your systems, too, because corporations gladly buy support and stability.
But this is usually a tiny trickle compared to the hardware sales, and its
very existence is _entirely_ dependent on your system being widely popular and
ubiquitous.

As a bottom line, it's much better to get a 5% margin from a $100M market than
a 25% margin from a $10M market.

~~~
hpcjoe
Exactly

------
Annatar
“If this doesn’t work for IBM, if this doesn’t give Big Blue a chance to
really capture a bigger slice of HPC and take some aggressive share in machine
learning and accelerated databases, it is hard to imagine what could.”

No it isn’t; why did all non-intel processors fade into obscurity and why does
intel architecture with all of its Zilog 80 baggage dominate? Because one
can’t get a dirt cheap (under $500) POWER9 desktop or server; same goes for
MIPS, UltraSPARC, anything else that’s modern and non-intel... why is ARM so
popular? Because one can buy it dirt chip for tinkering with it at home. That
is what propelled ARM and intel, people would install a Linux ISO on their
parents’ old PC and it built up familiarity.

Until that happens with POWER (or any other non-ARM, non-intel architecture)
history has taught me that it will fail. Hardware has to be easily accessble
and dirt cheap, and things like software mirroring or compilers must come with
the OS and all the software has to be gratis. Otherwise history says - fail!
Sometimes of epic proportions (hp, sgi, _Sun_ , IBM).

 _Sun Microsystems_ for example eventually realized that the software has to
be gratis and open source, but they lived in this fantasy world where they
thought they could charge anything they wanted for hardware — and would
indignantly argue about it when it was pointed out to them that it’s way too
overpriced and expensive. That lost them familiarity with the hardware and
familiarity with the OS because for most people a second hand used PC-bucket
with GNU/Linux _was good enough_ and the target audience wouldn’t have known
or cared about all the advanced features anyway. We all know how that ended.

~~~
baldfat
ARM is the future. Example Apple's A11. For single thread ((which is what's
most important on 90% of today's use cases) side note can this stop being true
by 2020?) can compete with single threaded processes.

Apple's A11 (single thread) 4217 (multi) 10164
[https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-
benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks)

Intel i7 8700k (single thread) 6089 (multi) 26654
[https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-
benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks)

It appears that we are near the end of physically making smaller nano meters
and we are back to the co-processors (Like the old Amiga days) Co-Processors
and some kind of Assembly (A Lisp that complies to an ARM Assembly to much for
one to ask for???) are going to be the way we improve speed in the future.

~~~
qubex
Coincidentally (as no doubt you are aware) yesterday Microsoft released
Windows 10 for ARM devices with built-in emulation, and a couple of hardware
partners launched suitable systems based on SnapDragon 835 SoC. The future is
arriving very fast.

~~~
baldfat
Softbank's purchase of ARM is looking like a genius move even more now.

~~~
qubex
Yeah, but beyond that, I'm still of the generation (born 1981) that grew up
hearing about amazing IBM RISC RS/6000 workstations, and so I'm still
inexplicably drawn to any mention of this kind of technology as a “shiny
thing”. I know it's mundane and broadly available in the lowest common-
denominator hardware but it still attracts me like a moth to a flame. I know
I'm a sucker.

------
TheCondor
Can I rent this by the hour in bluemix?

Just due to volume and cost, I’ve basically given up on the idea of owning my
own POWER system in my home rack. If ibm got aggressive with cloud pricing and
put together some dev friendly packages that were all tooled up and ready to
go, I’d be more than willing to play with it and see how it performs for my
tasks. In spirit, I’d love to see a competitive alternative to AWS and Intel,
we need it, but I have a hard time paying a premium for it to then experiment
and find out if it can actually outperform Main Street.

Tooling is huge here too, there are very material advantages to the incredible
hardware optimization done by node.js, pypy, llvm, etc.. since apple
transitioned off of PowerPC, I don’t think this platform has had nearly the
same amount of attention. I’d love to see IBM giving away access to their
version of a “micro” instance to OSS developers

------
nl
For those complaining about the price, here's some comparisons:

"two Power9 chips, four Volta GPUs accelerators, and 256 GB of memory"
=~$65,000

The NVidia DX1 (8 Tesla GPUs, 2 Xeon, so much more GPU, less CPU) is
$125,000[1]

Configuring up a SuperMicro GPU server looks to be around $50,000[2]

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/nvidia-dgx-1-deep-
learni...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/nvidia-dgx-1-deep-learning-
supercomputer/)

[2] [https://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-1029gq-
txrt](https://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-1029gq-txrt)

~~~
rbanffy
It's still an entry barrier. I can develop the software that'll run on the
NVidia box on my $2000 Xeon workstation and have a reasonable expectation the
$125K box will behave as expected.

While I trust POWER9 to be very fast, I have had odd performance differences
(both positive - meaning I overspent in hardware and had some explaining to do
- and negative - meaning I was too optimistic and had some explaining to do)
when moving from x86 to SPARC, Itanium and POWER (and MIPS - I'm that old).

The Talon are good entry level POWER9 systems for reasonable prices, but I'd
love to see parts trickling down to Xeon E5 prices.

If the barrier of entry is too high, only what already runs on POWER8 will
move to POWER9. Xeons have good cost/performance and are a safer bet.

~~~
qubex
I really badly want to get myself a Talon POWER9 system, but I’m scared of
being stuck with another “exotic” overpriced machine (in my time I’ve owned
BeBoxes and NeXTStations). Do you have one? Do you use it as a daily
workstation? Can I ask you some questions about it?

~~~
tempfs
Debian is available for POWER9.

This means you'll have at least KVM so you can run nearly anything on top of
that including Windows VMs with PCI-passthrough for gaming,etc.

The cost is non-trivial but I've been working up my nerve to pull the trigger
and go this route.

~~~
ptman
KVM + Windows requires x86(-64) hardware. POWER9 and windows means QEMU, which
is emulation and slow.

~~~
torpcoms
They did experiment with that in fact:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-secure-workstation#legacy-x86-applications-on-openpowertm-via-
qemu)

[https://player.vimeo.com/video/187042840](https://player.vimeo.com/video/187042840)

------
filereaper
Power9 might be a better fit as the invisible hardware behind the #serverless
services today (think BigQuery, etc...)

Lots of good points in this thread, but Power is likely going to go for the
invisible de-facto cloud data center hardware route.

------
StreamBright
I am not sure why water cooling. It is just so error prone.

~~~
ams6110
Data centers. More space efficient and less hot air to deal with.

------
snvzz
Too little, too late. There's RISC-V now.

~~~
rbanffy
POWER9 represents a colossal investment in high-performance processors. It'd
take a couple dozen billion dollars for RISC-V to get there.

~~~
snvzz
RISC-V is an ISA, while these high-performance processors are implementations
of an ISA.

~~~
rbanffy
This was about the RISC-V ecosystem.

~~~
snvzz
If it was IBM, it could get up there real fast in performance, by reusing
power. Unfortunately, they're having issues letting go of the power ISA.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's exactly what I said when someone wanted to know how to get RISC-V way
up there in clock rate or single-threaded. The other possibility was semi-
custom job at AMD or something. Just implement it in microcode with a little
extra hardware if necessary. Reuse tens to hundreds of millions of silicon
development. If not high in single-threaded but open, I suggested using Leon3
GPL for fast development or OpenSPARC for lots of cores. OpenPITON already
taped out a 25-core chip on 32nm SOI based on OpenSPARC. Many academics used
Leon for designs whether taping out or not.

IBM is different, though, in that they have a legacy system effect. Their
locked-in customers are where this money is coming from. That's why they keep
making the stuff to sell for exhorbitant rates. They really need to create
different tiers of pricing justifying it by saying the firmware or whole stack
is optimized for this, that, etc. If it's gravy train business, that optimized
stack is priced at the fortune the marketing team says it's worth. If it's not
(i.e. Raptor or RISC-V), it gets a steep discount just to encourage more
adoption with associated software porting. They seem too dumb to do this.

