
IBM’s 24-core Power9 chip - ajdlinux
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-power9/
======
renox
The article say Power9 chip will have "hardware assisted garbage collection"
and that's all, that's a bit short for such an important topic.. Does anyone
have more information about it?

~~~
brixon
The new SPARCs have something like that too.
[http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-
se...](http://www.mythics.com/about/blog/an-introduction-to-your-servers-next-
cpu-the-sparc-m7)

~~~
wepple
> Other silicon accelerators include a SQL coprocessor in each core. Entire
> SELECT statements now run at silicon speeds.

seriously? love to see how/why that was put in the die

~~~
valarauca1
Oracle did this in the past 2 generations of their UltraSPARC architecture.

At it's core a `SELECT FROM` statement is a filter lambda (without any joins,
or before/after a join has been done depending on query optimization).

Fundamentally this is because an SQL table is a flat array. With row's being
flat array's within the table's memory space.

Calculating the pointer to fields within rows within a table is ridiculously
parallel. You're limited only by SIMD size. (this is 1 FMA + 1 add against a
constant ~2 ticks).

Also custom wide SIMD registers can allow for `VARCHAR(255)` equality
statements to be done in 1 processor cycle.

~~~
kbenson
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that when a database company swallows a CPU
hardware division that the CPU might sprout some more database specific
operations, but I was.

I would love to see some benchmarks of how much this speeds up some sample
workload queries, if you happen to know of some (preferably not from Oracle's
marketing dept.)?

~~~
valarauca1
Oracle UltraSPARC purchasing agreement forbids 3rd party direct comparison
benchmarks.

The only ones you'll find by 3rd party are non-direct comparisons like
transactions per second in Oracle-SQL. Or Core Count.

~~~
kbenson
Why am I not surprised by this. I sometimes find myself thinking I should
check my bias against Oracle, just to make sure I'm not being too hard on them
for past transgressions (for example, Microsoft is far from perfect but
they've come a long ways from many of their more negative past practices).
Then I learn something like this, which while it doesn't directly mean they
are still continuing in predatory marketing and sales practices, doesn't
exactly assuage any fears I might have have had.

~~~
valarauca1
I currently work for a company that heavily uses Oracle technology. It's
horrible. Our culmative contracts are worth several hundred thousand dollars
per years.

But they'll still cheat us on small things. We request information on a
training seminar (we had a free attendance voucher), and they _lose_ our
account information until 1 week after the seminar ended.

It's to the point where I just laugh. Everyone knows their cheating us, but
upper management won't change.

~~~
ams6110
Oracle's database is pretty good (if you can afford it). All their other
software, from what I've seen, is shockingly bad considering their resources.

~~~
valarauca1
Yes if you shell out for all the money to run it on every core, and use a lot
memory it is solid. But the bang for your buck, Microsoft SQL has a better
support plan, and saner licensing model. My experience is working with smaller
datasets <200GB so YMMV.

I mean I'd rather use Postgres. But large corps like having a vendor to call.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Check out EnterpriseDB. I don't know how good they are in practice. But their
speciality is solving the exact problem you mentioned with Oracle vs Postgres.

[http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-
training/produ...](http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-
training/products/postgres-plus-advanced-server)

------
kbenson
So, this is the chip that Google, Facebook and Rackspace used in their design
for the open compute platform[1][2]. Maybe the entry level price will drop
when like those are buying them (or their components) at scale.

1: [http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-
google-...](http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-
rackspace-power9-system/)

2: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-chips-
hit-...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053092/ibms-power-chips-hit-the-big-
time-at-google.html)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Don't forget the Raptor Workstation. Allegedly, they plan to sell the thing
for less than what SGI and Sun sold their boxes in the past. Using POWER8-9
chips in a market where ebay's best deal is $4,000 for a POWER8 CPU. ;)

------
apaprocki
ISA 3.0 adds a new instruction 'darn' \-- Deliver a Random Number. That's a
pretty good asm mnemonic :) I wonder if anyone has dug into the details of how
that works yet?

~~~
planteen
Wow that's pretty good. My other favorite mnemonic is also from PowerPC
'eieio' \- enforce in-order execution of I/O.

~~~
ajdlinux
"IBM has a well-known disdain for vowels, and basically refuses to use them
for mnemonics (they were called on this, and did "eieio" as an instruction
just to try to make up for it)."

\- Linus Torvalds, 2009
([http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/coding_style.html](http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/coding_style.html))

~~~
planteen
Haha, didn't know that. I figured an engineer had a kid with an affinity for
Old MacDonald.

~~~
aruggirello
Old MacDonald had a (server) farm, eieio...

------
jalfresi
I'm quite naive regarding Power processors; does anyone know where I can see
any motherboards with prices for power processors, or even if any of the BSDs
run on them? It seems like it would be quite a nice platform/OS combination
that side-steps the traditional Apple/OSX vs Intel/Linux workstation options

~~~
aninteger
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD all have support for the older Apple G4 and G5
hardware. Obviously being older they are kind of slow (especially compared to
amd64) but if you just use them as file servers they are fine. The biggest
problem with BSD on PowerPC, in my opinion, is the lack of modern programming
languages. I believe on BSD you are stuck with C, C++, ruby, python, and perl
mostly. No node, no Java, no golang, no rust. If you use Debian you have
access to Java.

~~~
binarycrusader
While Go doesn't have a port to BSD on POWER, there is a Go port for POWER on
Linux (it's the s390x port).

I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult (relatively speaking) to do the port
as a result.

~~~
StillBored
s390!=POWER

The GOARCH for power is ppc64/ppc64le AFAIK.

(s390x is the mainframe processor, aka z/Architecture, the latest being the
z13 which is most definitely not a power8/9.)

~~~
binarycrusader
I had thought s390x could be based on POWER8/9, but you're right, that doesn't
appear to be the case. I apologise. Regardless, Go does consider S390x to be a
separate port.

~~~
jacques_chester
As I understand it, the s390x ISA is fully backwards compatible to stone
tablets. But it's essentially a POWER chip with a bit of extra decoder logic.

~~~
wmf
There's actually very little in common between z/Arch and Power, but I don't
blame you since "everybody knows" they are the same thing.

~~~
StillBored
Yah, most of the descriptions (just a little extra decode, aka PowerPC AS),
and sharing the hardware actually apply to the iSeries, which _IS_ POWER
based. But of course that is a minicomputer not a maninframe...

It seems the vast majority of people who consider themselves knowledgeable
about computers are just massively ignorant/confused by IBM's product lines
and capabilities (and don't even get me started about the nonstop and
openvms). Which is a bit of a shame, particularly in the case of IBM i, which
is probably one of the most interesting OS's still in support/production.

------
walki
When POWER8 came out in 2014 I ran a couple of numerical benchmarks against
Intel Xeon CPUs. In my benchmarks the POWER8 CPUs where slightly faster than
Intel Xeon CPUs when the data fitted into the CPU's cache, so far so good (the
speed advantage of the POWER8 CPU can easily be explained by the much higher
clocking). But once I started running heavy benchmarks involving gigabytes of
data the POWER8 CPUs where at least twice as slow. Now 3 years later POWER9
CPUs will come out that are about 1.5 times faster, in my opinion this is not
enough to compete against Intel. Why would anybody want to get locked into a
rare and more expensive CPU architecture if there is no speed advantage?

~~~
daxorid
Some of us believe that the open platform is worth the expense.

ME, and the absolute refusal of Intel to allow its own customers to disable
it, is very scary to the tinfoil hat crowd.

Unfortunately, Raptor Engineering is still early in development of their
POWER8 board, and even that may ultimately turn out to be vaporware.

~~~
spitfire
If they haven't released by now, they probably won't. Sad but true, technology
has a shelf life.

If they wait another 6 months it simply won't be economical to release it
ever.

------
theandrewbailey
Am I the only one who thinks that Power9 die shot looks pretty? Reminds me of
a stained glass window.

[http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-h...](http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-hot-chips-power9-die.jpg)

~~~
chiph
Intel used to publish poster-sized photos of their dies. I had one for the
Pentium-II. It'd be cool to get one of this.

~~~
rwmj
I had the 386 one in my dorm room at university.

Edit: This one, I think:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Intel_80...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Intel_80386_IV_die.JPG)
It's nice that you can almost see individual wires.

~~~
Meegul
Wow, that really is quite beautiful. People often don't realize the marvels of
technology involved in uploading their selfies.

------
redtuesday
I don't know why, but I always had a thing for Power CPU's. Really curious how
Power9 compares to Power8 and Intel Broadwell-EP/EX when it comes to power
efficiency (and of course performance wise).

~~~
pavlov
I loved the PowerPC chips, the 604 and G5 in particular. Too bad it never
became a viable platform outside of Apple.

(In the '90s, the PowerPC had very competitive price/performance, but there
wasn't a viable desktop OS available after Apple terminated the original MacOS
clone program. 5-10 years later Linux would have been much more ready, but the
chips were not competitive with Intel anymore.)

~~~
vonmoltke
PowerPC essentially died as a desktop and server processor once Apple decided
to go Intel. IBM decided to go back towards Power's roots with the POWER5 (the
follow-on to the PPC970 in the Power Mac G5 and the PowerPC-based XServes).

~~~
pavlov
PowerPC really died in 1997-98 when it became clear that Jobs wasn't going to
license Mac OS (classic or X) for 3rd party PowerPC boxes anymore, and Windows
NT on PPC wasn't going anywhere.

Without an operating system, IBM and Motorola didn't have an incentive to
build PC chips anymore. The G4 happened because it was already in development
and the vector extensions were useful for Motorola's embedded ambitions. The
G5 happened because Apple basically paid IBM to make a desktop chip out of
their POWER designs, AFAIK.

Around 2004, there was a startup PowerPC maker called P.A. Semi [1] that
apparently competed for Apple's Mac CPU business. After Apple went Intel, they
acquired P.A. Semi to design iPhone chips instead.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi)

------
rwmj
Now if only they'd make development boards available for less ~$4000.

~~~
chx
The Wii and the Wii U is your friend.

~~~
ajdlinux
As much as I think the Wii, the Wii U and the Xbox 360 are all the equal-best
gaming consoles ever (yes, I judge my gaming consoles purely by their CPU
architecture), each of those consoles uses a custom chip developed under a
specific IBM-{Nintendo, Microsoft} agreement, so they're somewhat different
chips from the POWER[n] series :)

~~~
chx
The Wii and Wii U are using PowerPC CPUs.

~~~
kbenson
Yes. The distinction being made here is that PowerPC is not necessarily the
same as Power, even if they have a shared lineage.

~~~
ajdlinux
More importantly, the _system_ architecture is different.

------
Unklejoe
I'm not too familiar with the PowerPC world, so maybe someone could help me
out. I know I should just search, but I'm feeling lazy.

Is this a new ISA or just the latest revision in their existing ISA?

Also, what's the relationship with Freescale (NXP) here, who sells pretty
decent "PowerPC" chips for server-ish platforms, such as the T2080.

Do they license the ISA from IBM sort of like how ARM works?

~~~
ajdlinux
It's a new revision of an existing ISA. POWER8 implements Power ISA 2.07,
POWER8 is 3.0.

The Freescale part of NXP was formed out of Motorola's semiconductor division
- Motorola, in turn, was part of the original AIM Alliance with Apple and IBM
back in the early 90s that developed PowerPC. So they've been making PowerPC
stuff since the very beginning. I would assume they have a license of some
sort from IBM.

[Disclaimer: IBMer, opinions my own]

~~~
jjtheblunt
typo on the second POWER8 ?

~~~
ajdlinux
Argh, yes, I meant POWER9. Thanks.

------
mtgx
Between Power9, AMD's Zen-based Naples, and Qualcomm's ARM-based Centriq,
things are looking pretty interesting for the future of servers.

~~~
wyldfire
IMO Xeon will be tough to unseat for performance. But a lot of server
consumers only want to be able to scale ever-more guest OS/containers on a
single platform, so these challengers do pose a real threat to Intel's server
market.

Open source software has been a powerful economic force: the fact that so much
software exists that's designed to target many similar platforms and is
frequently recompiled for those targets means that the impact to the end-
consumer of switching among x86/ppc/arm is much lower than it was in the past.

~~~
mtgx
I don't know if they have to beat Intel on performance per core. There are
markets that require the best performance per core, but there is also a big
market that wants more reasonably powerful cores for a given price point.

For instance, in the VPS hosting market, you see most providers offer "vCPUs"
(virtual CPUs), because then they can sell their customers "four cores" (or 20
cores) on the cheap, and so on. It's a good marketing strategy.

What if they can offer _real_ cores for the same low price? That would be
pretty appealing to their customers. They can also offer "24-core dedicated
servers" on the cheap, and so on.

Also, in the long run, it would be best for hosting and cloud providers if
they would at least adopt a strategy of 50% Intel chips, and 50% AMD + Power +
ARM. That should get them much better prices in the future (from _all_ the
chip providers), if they did that. Monopolies don't serve anyone but the
monopolist.

~~~
rwmj
They could look at the Cavium (ARM 64 bit) chips. 48 cores / socket, and
typically two sockets per server. Each core is in-order and rather slow. eg:
[http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-
page.aspx?pid=5460#...](http://b2b.gigabyte.com/products/product-
page.aspx?pid=5460#ov)

------
IgorPartola
So realistically, does processor architecture matter today from the custkmer's
point of view? I mean performance and all that matters, but presumably that
will be offset by market forces. But for example I rent a couple of ARM
servers from Scaleway as well as a whole bunch of x86-64 servers from various
providers, and they all can do all the same stuff. So why is it that x86 is
the chip data centers prefer when they could have a variety of chips and let
the customers and the market choose?

~~~
honkhonkpants
The only thing that matters in data centers is power consumption, so just as
soon as these compete on compute per joule, data centers will roll them out.

~~~
StillBored
Google/facebook datacenters maybe, but there are others where backwards
compatibility is actually the most important metric because the companies in
question have been investing in nonportable software for decades. Those places
tend to be massively heterogeneous as different business merged/etc and
absorbed the technology stacks or layered on newer technologies over older
ones.

~~~
honkhonkpants
Yeah, absolutely. Your basic corporate in-house development shop using C# and
SQL Server is married to Intel for all eternity. I think the Google/Facebook
crowd is really the best market for this IBM stuff, because those companies
control their entire stack and have the technical ability to port it.

~~~
kbenson
Well, they released SQL Server for linux (even if pared down feature-wise),
and that's probably a bigger hurdle than recompiling for a new architecture
(depending on whether their compilation toolchain supports it, and how well),
although there could still be some x86(_64) specific optimizations in place.

Sometimes weird stuff like supporting esoteric platforms happens because the
companies in question are so large, that it makes sense to spend a few $100k
on that project to make Intel squirm and get better pricing from Intel on your
bulk deal. Keep in mind, Microsoft have their own cloud service...

------
EdSharkey
Do these IBM systems have anything like Intel ME that might be used by Big Bro
for remote, covert rooting or subversion of the server? If yes on the standard
model, can we order a version of these systems that lack that feature?

I'd love to see some market forces nudging Intel to offer CPU's and
Motherboards without ME.

~~~
mvdwoord
Check out: [http://openpowerfoundation.org](http://openpowerfoundation.org)

and:
[https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php](https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php)

Supposedly this could be a way out of Intel ME. Gotta see it first though, but
I have one pre-ordered (whatever that means).

------
crudbug
Interesting, IBM wants to become ARM of server computing - "Open to IP
changes"

------
gpderetta
So, is the 24 cores 4 threads variant just the same as the 12 cores 8 thread
variants but with each (ridiculously) wide core statically partitioned in two?

edit: should have read till the end.

------
ignasl
I don't understand why IBM is not creating their own cloud services like
Amazon, MS or Google. They have talent, they make their own hardware and
software they are struggling a little bit with this new software landscape so
why not just do it?

~~~
velox_io
They acquired Softlayer, and they're pushing BlueMix and Watson pretty hard -
so they definitely have a footing in the cloud hosting/ services!

------
reacharavindh
Why wouldn't IBM just have a simple product page for such an innovation?

Like an Apple.com/iphone page for Power systems :-)

Search for Power9 on IBM.com yields practically nothing.

[http://www.ibm.com/search/esas/search?q=power9&v=17&sn=23&us...](http://www.ibm.com/search/esas/search?q=power9&v=17&sn=23&us=utf&lang=en&cc=us&Search=Search#v%3D%2B1%26q%3Dpower9)

Perhaps the website is all maintained by the folks busy in "the cloud".

~~~
bryanlarsen
Because this is just a technical preannouncement, you can't actually buy
anything yet? A search for POWER8 returns lots of hits.

~~~
reacharavindh
Agreed. I wasn't looking for a buy button. However, an authoritative info page
by IBM itself providing technical specs and details of the platform would earn
them good credits at least amongst the tech audience.

------
crudbug
24-core seems odd here, 32-core will be a more symmetric design ? What is main
reason for this ? Cost ?

~~~
pdq
I have no direct knowledge on IBM's processor, but from working on other
processors, usually it's due to product yield.

Today's cutting edge fabrication of multi-core chips makes it quite unlikely
to get many dies to manufacture where all the CPU's are working at high
speeds. Chips must run at a single frequency, so the slowest frequency is the
bottleneck. If you fabricated 32 cores, and 1 fails testing, the chip is
garbage.

So the strategy is that the chips are fabricated with 32 cores, and then they
speed-test the cores and take fastest 24 cores. The remaining 8 are fuse-
disabled, and the end user sees a 24 core chip.

Note this strategy also allows them to produce a 16-core chip with the same
die, if for example only 20 cores work at high speeds.

So you get both high yield and high speed chips.

~~~
AlbertoGP
Yes, that's done some times but in this case, from the die picture posted here
in another thread [1], it seems to have indeed 24 cores in 12 pairs (each of
the "houses").

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351729)

[http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-h...](http://www.nextplatform.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/ibm-hot-chips-power9-die.jpg)

