Power9 to the People

https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/12/05/power9-to-the-people/

by ajdlinux • 9 years ago

125 89 9 years ago

Annatar6• 9 years ago

“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.

ser9• 9 years ago

But the reason that intel is and has been cheap is the scale that their monopoly on the desktop has created. This position has given them a opportunity to develop fabs for node sizes that is out of reach for any competitor while keeping a competitive price point. At the moment it seems like Moores law is slowing down, and ARM on mobile has given scale to independent fabs to catch up with intel. So the situation may actually be a bit different this time.

_ph_• 9 years ago

It isn't about the cost of the cpu. Yes Intel eventually won on the market scale. But the real problem was, that you couldn't get a Sparc or PowerPc or whatever on a standard PC motherboard for a reasonable price. From the middle to end of the 90ies, lots of the Linux community would gladly have bought a non-x86 CPU/motherboard combo. The RISC-processors of that time still had an edge over Intel. Even later, with the G5 processor, they could have been competetive, if there had been a CPU/motherboard combo available.

orionblastar• 9 years ago

You do understand that this is server not PC tech? The mainframes and minicomputer that service hundreds of users at once? You remember the old client server model? IBM System/370 IBM AS/400 etc before they became System Z etc?

krylon• 9 years ago

But the machine shown here is not a mainframe nor a AS/400 or successor. It does not run AIX, OS/400 (pardon me: IBM i) or any of their mainframe OSes. It runs Linux.

And while I am sure it is a sweet machine that offers great performance and reliability, it is rather expensive. If you want to - especially if you mostly care about the GPU part anyway - you can get an Intel or AMD based machine for a fraction of the price.

IBM still stells the large POWER servers that run AIX or IBM i (in addition to Linux), and they still make their zSeries mainframes. But at least the latter are even more expensive.

All of these are really great machines; IBM has decades of experience building computers for some fairly demanding customers, and from what I know about these machines, it shows. But do not confuse the machine described in the article with IBM's top-shelf machines.

Annatar6• 9 years ago

As someone who literally grew up on HPC (sgi Origin 2000 and 3800’s to be precise), yes, I completely understand.

sliken• 9 years ago

Dunno, not sure I buy it. From a software devel point of view it's "just" linux. The full ecosystem is there, clang/gcc, ruby, perl, python, javascript, apache, mysql, nginx, postgres, etc. About the only thing I can think of that might be different is if you are using cycle counters for profiling things, but it's rare to need to get to that level these days.

I think the real problem is everyone likes to target the top of the Intel systems that sell in very low quantities. Sure I'm sure HFT folks can make huge $$$ trading just a bit faster. But the bulk of Intel server sales are the low/mid range. Things like the E5-2620/E5-2630 that costs $300-$500 per CPU and has nice capable servers starting around $2k.

Sure $65k power system with 4 Voltas sounds great. But few will drop over $50k on a server without having a few cheaper servers in production for awhile. Beating the collective performance of 10 $5k servers is also going to be tough. Amusingly Intel fails that same test, rarely are the top chips the best price/performance unless the cheaper servers trigger needing to buy a new building.

Not to mention if IBM starts getting traction you can bet those $5k per CPU intel chips will start getting discounts rather quickly.

klodolph2• 9 years ago

There’s a certain amount of laziness that prompts people to get bigger servers. I’ve been at a few companies where the solution to performance issues (as in, the thing that makes us money isn’t keeping up with customers and therefore we can’t grow our business) is to make the server bigger.

Switching to a distributed system is sometimes too far off the radar and costs precious engineering time. So the story is “just buy a bigger and faster computer, we’ll figure out how to shard this later.” The company drops more cash on IBM or whatever, and the engineers focus on features that close sales deals.

And then there are the larger companies which buy some expensive IBM servers and port their software in order to squeeze discounts out of Intel.

nigwil_• 9 years ago

I agree with your points [2][3]. Why is this so hard for vendors to understand?

It is an old idea called "mind share" [1] or in this case technical-mind-share, a vendor should want the largest possible community of technical people interacting with their technology and attempting to use it in as many niches as possible.

I'm not sure it even has to be uniformly cheap, as long as there is a low-cost entry point to hook people. If the price ratchets up from that low entry point but it is a compelling solution people will want it in their technical lives and get it funded somehow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_share [2] I would point to RISC-V as another example of a newly popular machine architecture due to its initial low-cost. [3] noting the preferenced technology must meet the minimal acceptable threshold for all the usual dimensions.

Asooka• 9 years ago

As a corollary: see Microsoft, Adobe, etc. turning a blind eye to casual home users pirating their software. IIRC Microsoft even offered a free upgrade from pirated Windows 7 to a legit Windows 10 Home.

Paianni• 9 years ago

Actually it is possible to get cheap MIPS stuff, not only in anonymous Android devices but also (m)atx boards Lemote produce for the CCP (for obvious reasons).

walterbell• 9 years ago

Can they be purchased in US or Europe?

Annatar6• 9 years ago

Desktop is what buys mindshare. A Raspberry Pi is an embedded device, a desktop and a very entry level server all in one and exactly that is the appeal. Where can one buy a dirt cheap, modern MIPS 1U server or a desktop today?

reacharavindh• 9 years ago

Yes, as an HPC admin, let me foretell how it will go here at our research group.

Me: Oh look this is fascinating! We have a worthy competitor to intel processors and we can do our work way faster. Let's get this!

Boss: Ok, tell me why one of this costs more than all of our other servers put together?

Me: But, it is so much better, it does blah, blah and more blah.

Boss: Do we really need it? What would we save by getting this instead of the commodity servers we normally buy. May be we should look into making our code work better with GPUs instead?

Me: ..........

Don't get me wrong. I think this really is fascinating. Just for the HFT traders and the top 1% buyers of exotic hardware. Not to an average HPC shop like ours, until the economy of scale and premium catches up to value.

phkahler3• 9 years ago

> Not to an average HPC shop like ours...

And there lies the problem. HPC used to be a tiny market with huge budgets where expensive hardware was the norm. It's just not that big a deal any more. It's commodity hardware now with lots of cores and GPUs running OSS. They won't make it trying to charge a premium just because it's Power9.

onikolas2• 9 years ago

I wonder if Moore's law was the real reason why all the RISC vendors failed while Intel succeeded.

Lets say IBM sells server hardware for 60K USD per machine versus Intel's 20k (I made the numbers up) and shows, through extensive benchmarking, that despite the higher initial cost, their machine's performance/dollar is better than Intel.

Then 2 years later Moore's law happens. Intel's new 20k offering now outperforms IBM's old machine on every metric. In hindsight, IBM didn't make sense financially.

With Moore's law slowing down, maybe now its the right time for IBM to make a move.

klodolph2• 9 years ago

Intel chips are more RISC-like on the “inside” after the instructions are decoded, and in that sense RISC is successful. ARM is RISC and very successful. But most RISC and CISC vendors alike are failures by comparison to Intel and ARM, and the IBM Power processors are just not that performant per watt. You don’t even have to wait 2 years, they’re already not as good.

Part of this may be due to Intel’s lead in manufacturing technology, and have nothing to do with architecture.

(Historically, RISC was much more competitive. Talking about current state of affairs.)

rbanffy8• 9 years ago

Zilog 80 baggage

8080, please. The 8086 was designed to be assembly-level source compatible with 8080's so porting software (here's to you, Gary) from CP/M would be easy.

wolfgke• 9 years ago

8080, please. The 8086 was designed to be assembly-level source compatible with 8080's so porting software (here's to you, Gary) from CP/M would be easy.

1. The 8086 was not designed to be assembly-level source compatible, but nevertheless intended that assembly code from 8080 could easily be ported to 8086 (mostly find & replace)

2. Zilog developed a different assembly language for the Z80 than Intel used for the 8080 (for copyright reasons, I think - though nearly everybody would agree that Zilog's assembly syntax is better; compare for yourself: http://nemesis.lonestar.org/computers/tandy/software/apps/m4... ). The Z80 assembly language was a strong inspiration for the x86 (8086) assembly language (Intel syntax).

3. The Z80 introduced two index registers (IX, IY) over the 8080. A strange coincidence that Intel also did introduce two index registers for the 8086 (si, di).

4. Do the INI/INIR/IND/INDR/OUTI/OUTIR/OUTD/OUTDR that were introduced by Zilog for the Z80 strongly remind you of the INS/REP INS/OUTS/REP OUTS (just consider that the 8086 uses the direction flag) instructions of the 8086?

etc.

TLDR: Intel took more "inspiration" from the Z80 than is generally acknowledged.

Annatar6• 9 years ago

The 8080 and 8086 designs draw directly from Z80. You can see it in the assembler mnemonics and how the operands are handled. And segmented memory access, oh my!

swiley• 9 years ago

You can definitely get cheap MIPS machines, I have a MIPS board in my robot that only costs $5 in bulk.

Hazematman• 9 years ago

Do you have a link to which MIPS machine it is?

baldfat2• 9 years ago

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

Intel i7 8700k (single thread) 6089 (multi) 26654 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.

qubex4• 9 years ago

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.

snvzz4• 9 years ago

ARM is the past, as pretty much every prominent chipmaker currently using ARM is in the RISC-V consortium today, and will be selling chips based on RISC-V tomorrow.

ams61103• 9 years ago

M68K and PowerPC architectures died out, and were available in consumer systems (Macintosh) and while not "dirt" cheap still in the ballpark of affordable. And you could find old cheap ones and run linux on them too.

The real reason Intel/AMD64 is popular is the same reason Windows is popular -- mindshare and economies of scale. IBM and the x86 platform won the business desktop in the 1980s and that has been propelling everything on that architecture ever since.

deaddodo• 9 years ago

why does intel architecture with all of its Zilog 80 baggage dominate

The Z80 was a clone of the 8080, not the other way around.

snvzz4• 9 years ago

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

Keyframe4• 9 years ago

In principle, yes. In practice, it's still at least a few years out in the space they're targeting. At least.

dvfjsdhgfv• 9 years ago

I think it might be there sooner than we expect. The WD announcement (completely different market) came as a great surprise, a least to me. I bet we can be surprised by RISC-V being used in many different ways relatively soon.

rbanffy8• 9 years ago

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

snvzz4• 9 years ago

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

nl3• 9 years ago

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...

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

rbanffy8• 9 years ago

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.

nl3• 9 years ago

Yeah that’s absolutely true.

The ecosystem of tuned software just isn’t as big on Power.

qubex4• 9 years ago

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?

StreamBright• 9 years ago

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

ams61103• 9 years ago

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

TheCondor• 9 years ago

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

filereaper• 9 years ago

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.

hpcjoe3• 9 years ago

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.

ssfsa• 9 years ago

"nothing could touch Irix for ease of use"

Love my Fuel. Wish I could still use it as a dialy driver (too expensive to run electrically). Management really destroyed you guys, eh?

mtgx• 9 years ago

So if power9 is 5x the speed of a Xeon

Is Xeon 5x the speed of Xeon? How do those institutions ever upgrade then?

I think what you're really saying is Power9 needs to be 5x the speed compared to Xeons from 5 years ago or whatever. Because otherwise new Xeons would never replace older Xeons either, following that logic.

Power9 and other Intel alternatives just need to show 1.5x-2x the value compared to Intel's latest.

nine_k2• 9 years ago

I read it as the following: "If you offer a machine that has N times the performance of the current industry standard machine, it should cost cost kN times the current industry standard machine where k < 1".

That is, there's no incentive to pay the cost of switching if you don't save any money in the longer term. And that "longer term" is usually but a few years.

nine_k2• 9 years ago

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.

hpcjoe3• 9 years ago

Exactly

api• 9 years ago

I think this is exactly correct. It's why the Raspberry Pi is so brilliant for the ARM ecosystem. It gives devs an easy way to get exposed to ARM and paves the way for higher end ARM servers, laptops, desktops, etc.

Power9 would really have to double down to have any chance of beating x64 and ARM, especially with RISC-V also about to enter the mix with its own advantages (openness). I think their only chance would be to actually sell it at cost or at a loss, at least at the entry level.

jabl3• 9 years ago

I think POWER9 is not radically different from a Skylake Xeon, from a performance perspective.

AFAICS, the selling point of this thing is that it has a higher BW and cache coherent connection between the GPU's and CPU's.

Of course, some users like national labs, Google etc., might want to invest in this as a strategic investment, to keep Intel from becoming even more of a monopoly than they already are.

Keyframe4• 9 years ago

Good example with IRIX. I liked it as well, but I liked HP-UX too. So, YMMV.

kev009• 9 years ago

There is a $400 4 core that Raptor Engineering is using in the Talos II. The top bin SO is only $5k, go look at Skylake pricing. This is dirt cheap.

Hint, without specifics due to NDA, go talk to Supermicro sales directly about POWER systems.

Power9 to the People

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