a little bit disappointed that the motherboard only support up to 8 cores and actually comes with a 4 cores processor.
such low core count is making the product not that attractive - I can go with µATX MB + Xeon if I want computing power or a decent 6/8-core ARM board for smaller form factor. to just try a different ISA, I'd probably choose RISC-V to maximize my potential investment return.
You can buy riscv in a year or 2 (for desktop), or wait 5 years for it to become performance competitive. Or you can buy power9 today (or end of 2019 for a cheaper model) and get a system that already exists, has silicon in production, and already appears to be performance competitive with Intel.
Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first because I'm not necessarily in a place where I can justify the money even for an open platform, but let's not pretend that there are massive benefits to both.
> Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first
This is pretty much my threshold as well, but when I actually think about these numbers and put them in perspective with regards to how much I used to spend on 486/pentium desktop computers when they were modern, and adjust those numbers for inflation, it's downright absurd that I'm not willing to spend what raptorcs is asking for a modern, open platform, in 2018 dollars.
This is really remarkable "you can audit and modify any portion of the open source firmware on the Blackbird™ mainboard, all the way down to the CPU microcode."
Or a 4-core ITX ARM board with almost[1] 100% open TianoCore UEFI firmware with ACPI and with x86 emulation for VBIOS [2] that allows video output from the EFI framebuffer… with a DIMM included… for a THIRD of the price of the Blackbird:
Not really blob free then, is it? ;-) Do you get full documentation of the processor internals and board schematics with that kit? How about an owner-controlled secure boot, or is that remaining blob vendor-locked / vendor signature controlled?
The most pertinent point though is that the POWER9 will run circles around the ARM board in terms of performance, guaranteed. We're using the POWER9 as a full desktop replacement, ARM never really worked out in that role due to general performance issues / lagginess vs. the x86 boxes that were being replaced. A ~2GHz embedded ARM core isn't going to match up to a ~4GHz POWER core, at least not favorably -- you do get what you pay for!
EDIT: On further comparison the Blackbird has double the SATA ports, double the SATA speed, two PCIe Gen 4 slots (a x16 and a x8) instead of a single Gen 3 x4, and quadruple the USB 3.0 ports. Really, the Blackbird is in a different class from that ARM system; it's competing against Intel and AMD boards, not against the low end ARM offerings.
Of course 4GHz and PCIe x16 are very desirable, but $1000 for just the board+CPU bundle is waaaay too much if you just want to play with a non-x86 desktop.
With AMD, you can fit a whole build (with an 8-core CPU, RAM, SSD and a good GPU) into $1000. Your mainboard is just ridiculously expensive. Yes, I understand that the volume is low and there was a lot of new R&D and whatnot… but it's still just a big PCB. What costs so much? Is PCIe gen 4 (that I don't need) contributing to the cost a lot?
I guess situation where you are privacy-conscious enough to inspect all the source code up to and including the CPU microcode? There was post in this thread about FreeBSD being available. If there is a Linux kernel for it, then a distribution might be not too far off e.g. Gentoo (I’m not aware of any POWER9 Linux distribution as off yet).
Fedora 28 and up boots directly on the Talos II and should boot on this. I use F28 myself, but the Raptor folks use Debian which I'm told also works well.
For one, all x86 malware fails instantly. That's why some people I knew who wouldn't be targeted more specifically were still on PowerPC Macs. Their software was fine for their use case. I have one for experiments from 2003 that ran YouTube fine with a bit of lag a year or two ago. Although I used default, there's even still a browser for it:
People who use a lot of terminal apps that don't need a full-on browser or non-portable apps can use it to its fullest. Most importantly besides owner-controlled, the fact that you're getting to use, show off, and develop on a unique system nobody else in your area probably has. Let's not forget the novelty and awing people aspect of tech that might sell some of these.
TenFourFox dev here. I certainly agree that security through obscurity (especially on less common architectures) is underestimated in terms of the protection it offers, though it should never be the only security means, of course. However, I think the biggest practical risk to unusual arches is through cross-platform-capable code. If you'll pardon a minor shameless plug, for the security advice I give Power Mac owners using TenFourFox, see
As you'll see from the article, aside from the OS X-specific exploits on Power Macs, components capable of running platform-independent code such as Java, Flash and Office macros are probably where the biggest risk is. And, of course, web browsers. Unfortunately these are some of the most common types of applications for people to run and very few are maintained on Power Macs anymore.
The good news with Talos and other P9 systems is that they're now running supported and maintained software and most of the applications people want to use "just work," so that problem goes away.
Thanks for chiming in! Great work on TenFourFox, too! I was stunned one person or a small team could even do that given how large Firefox is. I know you probably focus on a subset of it but still.
"components capable of running platform-independent code such as Java, Flash and Office macros are probably where the biggest risk is."
I'll add the risk of those components mostly has to do with their complexity, use of unsafe language, and security not being a concern in design. It's true there's gonna be exploits, esp on legacy systems. The crowd I was talking about was mainly concerned with malware forcing reinstalls, etc. That attackers mostly target high-ROI platforms meant they didnt have that problem any more. Although I suggested Ubuntu, they're Mac people with Mac apps they want to keep.
"The good news with Talos and other P9 systems is that they're now running supported and maintained software and most of the applications people want to use "just work," so that problem goes away."
Exactly. On top of it, many techniques for mitigating vulnerabilities have a performance cost. Esp overflow checking and microkernels. The extra speed of POWER9's might turn that from unbearable to acceptable. For me, Im fine with being stuck at Core Duo 2 performance for most tasks cuz my now-deadish, 9-yr-old laptop was working fine. If I get same performance but more security/control, that's a net gain. If it's faster, too, then that's even better. Similar argument might apply to those of you that port risky PPC software to it.
Thanks! Most of the work these days is maintaining the 32-bit PPC JIT and keeping up with security patches from the ESRs. Unfortunately I can only shove so many new features into old wineskins. :/
But what I learned from Classilla I used to port TenFourFox, and what I learned from TenFourFox I'm using to write a POWER9 JIT for Firefox and keep the build working. So it's all incremental.
For me, it's a combination of familiarity with Power ISA since the RS/6000 days, a chance to have as trustworthy and auditable machine as possible (no ME/PSP bullcrap), and a desire to support other architectures than the usual ARM or x86 duopoly. Fortunately, you don't have to make very many compromises. Most stuff just works and I'm delighted with the performance of my Talos. Most of all, I'm very confident it's not doing anything or exposing something that would make me vulnerable or insecure because I can audit it myself and the full documentation is included.
If people want choice in computing, we need to step up and support these alternatives or we'll reap exactly what we've sown.
Wow, SFP ports. I'm seriously tempted to pick one of these up... the only downside is that it appears information on the CPU (and specifically the TDM interface protocol) is locked behind a Marvell NDA. That'd limit its potential for expansion, though I guess USB is still an option.
Power9 is one of the highest instructions-per-clock architectures in the world.
Power9 just has relatively weak vector units: only 128-bit. (Even AMD Threadripper has support for 256-bit. Power9 128-bit is executed per super-slice, so its really 2x64-bit, to compare against AMD's 2x128-bit support) Otherwise, its throughput is downright insane. 6-issues per clock (Skylake only has 6 if its in the uOp cache: otherwise the decoder only pushes 4 uOps), 10MB of L3 per pair of cores. That's 20MB of L3 on the 4-core, and 110MB of L3 cache on the 22-core.
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As far as price/performance goes, the 18-core / 72-thread chip seems best. But the 4-core / 16-thread or 8-core / 32-thread chips aren't bad, as far as I can tell.
The main issue is that most compute-heavy code these days use those vector units (2x128 on AMD, 2x256 on Intel). But if you got a big GPU for SIMD / vectorized ops, then that disadvantage kinda goes away. GPUs are way fatter than Intel or AMD.
The other issue is that AMD is offering cores at stupidly low prices. AMD Threadripper and EPYC are the machines to look at for raw CPU power these days. But I'd argue that the 18-core Power9 ($1,050) is at a good price/performance level. If you can find any application that benefits from the stupid-high 90MB of L3 cache on the 18-core, then you're more or less golden.
phoronix.com just published some Power9 vs. Xeon vs Epyc benchmarks[1]. It is actually not on par with Xeon/Epyc. also note that the motherboard used by those Power9 has a price tag of $2499, when a dual socket LGA3647 motherboard from a first tier vendor can be purchased at $400 delivered.
A lot of the "weakness" there is due to the weak 4x64-bit vector units equipped on the Power9. Again: 4x64-bit vector units (Power9) simply has less throughput than 4x128-bit (EPYC) units, which has less throughput than 3x512-bit (Xeon Gold) vector units.
On the few tests which don't have anything to do with vector units, Power9 does incredibly well. See 7-Zip Compression, Stockfish, Fhourstones, LLVM compiles. Power9 is very, very far ahead of the game here.
When vector units (ie: OpenMP or intrinsics) are involved: such as Parboil, Gimp, x264, Rodinia, etc. etc. the Power9 does very poorly.
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Something else I've noticed: Power9 has a lot of latency behind its units: it is always 2-cycles or 3-cycles of latency (while EPYC or Skylake have many operations with 1-cycle of latency, like add or subtract). Power9 relies upon instruction-level parallelism to get things done.
So there are a few cases like the Rust Mandelbrot benchmark, which surely hits that latency problem, while the Rustlang Prime benchmark shows off the ILP goodness the system offers.
All POWER products offer SMT. The POWER9 OpenPOWER chips are all 4 threads per core (SMT4), so a 4 core device presents 16 logical cores to the OS. POWER's hardware threading system is also unique and has high performance compared to offerings from other vendors (mainly x86) -- check out the processor user manual [1] for all the details.
So basically a quad CPU + motherboard for $1000. IBM doesn't seem confident enough in the performance of the power 9 to publish standard benchmarks like CPU2017.
So if you want something with published scores on a wide variety of benchmarks that are included in CPU2017 get an Epyc or a Xeon.
Ah, looks like someone formatted the IBM entries incorrectly, at least unlike all the AMD and Intel entries I could find.
Usually the description has a CPU entry something like "Intel Xeon Gold 6148". The IBM entries have things like "3.4 - 3.8 GHz, 40 core, SLES". So if you search any of the lists for "power9" you don't find anything.
This is great! I’ve been hoping someone — IBM or one of it’s partners like Raptor or Gigabyte — would make a lower-end POWER8/9 system available. The price of this board ($1K) is much more affordable for a hobbyist developer who wants to tinker with POWER, try porting some open-source projects, etc.
Yeah, this is what was exciting about the HiFive Unleashed: it's an actual Linux-capable RISC-V board with standard peripherals. The only downside is that it's about $4,000USD, all-told.
The price is a little high, sadly. I don't blame them, it can't be that cheap to design and produce, and it really is what I would like to see as a desktop option.
I mean it really sucks that we cry for non-X86 desktops, and when someone finally delivers, we complain about price. It's just little hard to justify for something I'd basically buy as a "toy".
Compare to an Intel 16 thread CPU + motherboard with ECC RAM and the ability to address more than 64GB of RAM. You're well into Xeon parts probably in the $300-400 range just for the CPU, then to get a decent motherboard is probably another $200. So you're paying a 2x premium for this Raptor Computing offering, that's really not THAT bad of pricing!
This pricing is an order of magnitude better than some of the previous Raptor Computing POWER systems which will hopefully open up their market to a wider audience and help drive down prices in the future.
That's true, I didn't really considered what the same money would buy me in x86 hardware. Still I think the point is that many of us would like something like a Power9 for our desktop, but we honestly don't need that level of hardware, so we hope for something around half price to justify buying what is essentially a luxury item.
I agree, compared to x86, it is not that bad. I think the problem is, most people would have to buy this instead of their primary PC instead of a secondary machine to play with. That's a really big commitment for a lot of people.
I genuinely hope this takes off, I would love to replace my primary desktop with a power system. And any way you slice it, this is just _AWESOME_.
Could you say more about what you see yourself as getting for that 2x premium? Skimming articles it sounds like the POWER9 line's main attraction is the potential for higher performance?
1. All Intel and AMD CPU's are backdoored with management processors running black box software that's already had vulnerabilities. They refuse to remove the backdoors for consumer segment for probably shady reasons. These POWER CPU's have open-source firmware, OpenBMC, which is a little better on trust side. Personally, I think they're still backdoored somehow since IBM is one of NSA's longest-running partners. Still a risk reduction if we go from anyone might hit this closed software to open software anyone can analyze and improve.
2. People that want POWER ISA or just a RISC ISA at x86's performance. The x86 ISA is pretty horrible to some of us. It also locks you into specific patterns of execution, like its stack architecture, that can make it harder to efficiently implement alternative schemes. POWER could be more flexible for alternative designs.
2.1. PowerPC, like sold by NXP/Freescale, is still used in a lot of safety-critical fields along with sections of the embedded sector. While invisible to desktop programmers, it kept getting better and better for niches like with QorIQ CPU's for telecoms. I speculated developing on a POWER architecture for POWER-like targets might be easier somehow (idk though).
2.2. The separation kernels like INTEGRITY-178B were all originally designed for PowerPC boards like Curtis-Wright makes for aerospace and military. They might be easier to port in evaluated configuration to a Raptor than to x86. There are also a lot of hardware/software architectures for improving security that work better when you know what the hardware is doing in the first place and/or can modify the firmware. OpenPOWER has more potential for these designs with the main drawback being CompSci folks usually not able to afford expensive, new computers. Somebody might port an existing idea, though, that they were doing on MIPS, Leon3, ARM, etc.
2.3. The Amiga people also use PowerPC-based machines. They're willing to pay a premium to maintain their nostalgia. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ports MorphOS or something like that to these machines.
The price is low compared to the high-end, low-volume, RISC workstations of the past. Those started at around five digits. On the not-quite-as-performant end, there's even more ARM solutions showing up. Escaping Intel and increasing ecosystem diversity has never been cheaper.
What does 'isolated' mean in the context? AFAIK ethernet connections are always isolated using transformers, so I don't suppose they are talking about galvanic isolation here.
Some BMCs have the ability to listen on both the normal ports and the BMC-dedicated port (or just the sole normal port). Some do that all the time and some do that when the BMC-dedicated port isn't plugged in.
I think this research was where I heard about this:
They don't mean electrically isolated. This means there is a dedicated ethernet port that's isolated to just the BMC (physically incapable of speaking to the IBM processor). It's a security feature.
On many servers you can have a single physical ethernet port that works for both the service processor (BMC) and host processor. If you want someone to have access to only the host system and not the BMC then you place your trust in a bunch of hardware and firmware that does the sharing of the port.
Having the port shared can save in cabling, but you trade that off for trusting some firmware to do the right thing.
Isolated ports mean that you can have one cable that goes to the BMC and only the BMC, and one that goes to the host and only the host. i.e. you place trust for isolation in the fact that two cables go to two different places, and don't involve another bit of firmware.
We have FreeBSD running with radeon driver and will have a ~linux4.20 amdgpu driver up by the time blackbird ships. Most the performance work is usable, our goal is to have a usable daily driver around Q1 https://github.com/POWER9BSD/freebsd
> FlexVer™ is a new, owner-controlled security technology designed to safeguard critical data and applications in the event of software or hardware tampering. FlexVer™ allows a system to be provisioned in a trusted physical environment, then deployed to an untrustworthy physical location while retaining system integrity.
It doesn't seem to say anywhere what drives the HDMI output, just "2D". Is that just for connection to a PCI card? Or is there some rudimentary VESA frame-buffer chip on it, just to watch it boot?
It has a server-style BMC which drives the HDMI port. It's only a basic 2D framebuffer device (with basic 3D "support" through the LLVMpipe OpenGL/Mesa software rasterizer), though Raptor Computer claims it's good enough for daily use. Obviously if you need high-performance 3D or more than 1 display you need would an add-in card.
You might run into problems with compositing window managers on that interface. Gnome supposedly has a pure-software fallback now, but it may be less than ideal.
Most systems assume a minimal level of 3D acceleration support for desktop use. Watching video, browsing the web, etc... could suck down a lot more CPU than you're used to.
NBD if you're using it as a server, but problematic as a daily driver desktop.
For what it's worth, LLVMPipe normally picks up the basic 3D requirements without much trouble. When using Xorg though you definitely want to enable the 2D acceleration and disable Glamor; the chip is a fairly decent 2D framebuffer.
On a slightly different topic, I'm not sure this push to force libre software into requiring a 3D GPU is a good idea while every 3D capable card / chip currently being made relies on proprietary firmware enforcing various forms of DRM. If at some point the already existing DRM starts being extended to protect modern 3D support (e.g consider no 4k /8k 3D allowed without DRM handshake), there is no reasonable fallback for the desktop (leaving games etc. aside); this is not a good place to be IMO.
It'd be better to watch it boot over serial (which can also be done via SSH to the BMC) rather than this graphics port.
the BMC chip (ast2500) has support for being a GPU for the host processor. It's a good old pretty dumb 2D framebuffer. Good for running an OS installer on.
Because (currently, we're working on it) boot time is more than a couple of seconds before we could bring up a discrete GPU, this connector will get you boot progress (and let you see an error) that occurs before we could fire up a PCIe GPU.
Hmmmm... the $1,129.99 for the "Lite" motherboard seems like a better value, especially because the "Lite" motherboard supports 22-core (88-thread) CPUs... or more importantly... the 18-core (72-thread) CPU, which seems like a good value.
However, at $799 + 4-cores or 8-cores, the main purpose of this board is for "toy" uses. There's no way that the 4-core IBM is going to be anywhere as fast as a 16c/32t Threadripper 1950x (going for ~$450 these days btw), but it would be the cheapest machine to build for the Power9 system.
So that alone is important. The "Basic" box would be for developer machines, while the "production" machine would be 22-core, or maybe 12-core SMT8 (the "thicker" IBM design where 8-SMT is possible).
Consider this: what if you were developing for Summit? Do you want to rent supercomputer time when you're writing your code? Or do you test it out on a cheaper 4-core, $799 motherboard machine? https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
I think the other advantage is the size. The EATX size of the T2 and T2 Lite is a bit bulky for some applications. We're actually thinking of sticking the 4-core Blackbird we ordered in the home theatre and using it for media as well as general computing. The mATX form factor just gives you much more flexibility.
Can you please share details about your HTPC build? What case will you be using? Did you choose Raptor's 2U heatsink assembly, their 3U HSF assembly, or something else?
You seem to be forgetting one of the key advantages of the platform: fully available and controllable source code, including firmware.
For some applications, the compute performance is secondary to that, but price always plays a role. A moderately powerful workstation that runs 100% audited code is very desirable for some uses.
Having such a powerful (or at least performant), free and risc-y machine has been a dream of mine for quite some time now...
If I can only find a good argument to my wife as why we need one :P
I think that, when Raptor were demoing the blackbird at OpenPOWER Summit EU 2018, they were using a Lian-Li PC-05 case w/ the 2U HSF. You'd want to check with their sales/support for recommendations though.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadsuch low core count is making the product not that attractive - I can go with µATX MB + Xeon if I want computing power or a decent 6/8-core ARM board for smaller form factor. to just try a different ISA, I'd probably choose RISC-V to maximize my potential investment return.
[0]: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B02/intro.html
Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first because I'm not necessarily in a place where I can justify the money even for an open platform, but let's not pretend that there are massive benefits to both.
This is pretty much my threshold as well, but when I actually think about these numbers and put them in perspective with regards to how much I used to spend on 486/pentium desktop computers when they were modern, and adjust those numbers for inflation, it's downright absurd that I'm not willing to spend what raptorcs is asking for a modern, open platform, in 2018 dollars.
https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/macchiatobin...
[1] one 12kb blob: https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/binaries-marvel... [2] https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf...
The most pertinent point though is that the POWER9 will run circles around the ARM board in terms of performance, guaranteed. We're using the POWER9 as a full desktop replacement, ARM never really worked out in that role due to general performance issues / lagginess vs. the x86 boxes that were being replaced. A ~2GHz embedded ARM core isn't going to match up to a ~4GHz POWER core, at least not favorably -- you do get what you pay for!
EDIT: On further comparison the Blackbird has double the SATA ports, double the SATA speed, two PCIe Gen 4 slots (a x16 and a x8) instead of a single Gen 3 x4, and quadruple the USB 3.0 ports. Really, the Blackbird is in a different class from that ARM system; it's competing against Intel and AMD boards, not against the low end ARM offerings.
With AMD, you can fit a whole build (with an 8-core CPU, RAM, SSD and a good GPU) into $1000. Your mainboard is just ridiculously expensive. Yes, I understand that the volume is low and there was a lot of new R&D and whatnot… but it's still just a big PCB. What costs so much? Is PCIe gen 4 (that I don't need) contributing to the cost a lot?
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:PPC
Looking around, power9 seems to work fine. For software compatibility it's more a case by case scenario.
https://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
People who use a lot of terminal apps that don't need a full-on browser or non-portable apps can use it to its fullest. Most importantly besides owner-controlled, the fact that you're getting to use, show off, and develop on a unique system nobody else in your area probably has. Let's not forget the novelty and awing people aspect of tech that might sell some of these.
https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-security-blanket...
As you'll see from the article, aside from the OS X-specific exploits on Power Macs, components capable of running platform-independent code such as Java, Flash and Office macros are probably where the biggest risk is. And, of course, web browsers. Unfortunately these are some of the most common types of applications for people to run and very few are maintained on Power Macs anymore.
The good news with Talos and other P9 systems is that they're now running supported and maintained software and most of the applications people want to use "just work," so that problem goes away.
"components capable of running platform-independent code such as Java, Flash and Office macros are probably where the biggest risk is."
I'll add the risk of those components mostly has to do with their complexity, use of unsafe language, and security not being a concern in design. It's true there's gonna be exploits, esp on legacy systems. The crowd I was talking about was mainly concerned with malware forcing reinstalls, etc. That attackers mostly target high-ROI platforms meant they didnt have that problem any more. Although I suggested Ubuntu, they're Mac people with Mac apps they want to keep.
"The good news with Talos and other P9 systems is that they're now running supported and maintained software and most of the applications people want to use "just work," so that problem goes away."
Exactly. On top of it, many techniques for mitigating vulnerabilities have a performance cost. Esp overflow checking and microkernels. The extra speed of POWER9's might turn that from unbearable to acceptable. For me, Im fine with being stuck at Core Duo 2 performance for most tasks cuz my now-deadish, 9-yr-old laptop was working fine. If I get same performance but more security/control, that's a net gain. If it's faster, too, then that's even better. Similar argument might apply to those of you that port risky PPC software to it.
But what I learned from Classilla I used to port TenFourFox, and what I learned from TenFourFox I'm using to write a POWER9 JIT for Firefox and keep the build working. So it's all incremental.
If people want choice in computing, we need to step up and support these alternatives or we'll reap exactly what we've sown.
Power9 just has relatively weak vector units: only 128-bit. (Even AMD Threadripper has support for 256-bit. Power9 128-bit is executed per super-slice, so its really 2x64-bit, to compare against AMD's 2x128-bit support) Otherwise, its throughput is downright insane. 6-issues per clock (Skylake only has 6 if its in the uOp cache: otherwise the decoder only pushes 4 uOps), 10MB of L3 per pair of cores. That's 20MB of L3 on the 4-core, and 110MB of L3 cache on the 22-core.
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As far as price/performance goes, the 18-core / 72-thread chip seems best. But the 4-core / 16-thread or 8-core / 32-thread chips aren't bad, as far as I can tell.
The main issue is that most compute-heavy code these days use those vector units (2x128 on AMD, 2x256 on Intel). But if you got a big GPU for SIMD / vectorized ops, then that disadvantage kinda goes away. GPUs are way fatter than Intel or AMD.
The other issue is that AMD is offering cores at stupidly low prices. AMD Threadripper and EPYC are the machines to look at for raw CPU power these days. But I'd argue that the 18-core Power9 ($1,050) is at a good price/performance level. If you can find any application that benefits from the stupid-high 90MB of L3 cache on the 18-core, then you're more or less golden.
I'd bet that databases love that L3 cache.
phoronix.com just published some Power9 vs. Xeon vs Epyc benchmarks[1]. It is actually not on par with Xeon/Epyc. also note that the motherboard used by those Power9 has a price tag of $2499, when a dual socket LGA3647 motherboard from a first tier vendor can be purchased at $400 delivered.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-x...
On the few tests which don't have anything to do with vector units, Power9 does incredibly well. See 7-Zip Compression, Stockfish, Fhourstones, LLVM compiles. Power9 is very, very far ahead of the game here.
When vector units (ie: OpenMP or intrinsics) are involved: such as Parboil, Gimp, x264, Rodinia, etc. etc. the Power9 does very poorly.
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Something else I've noticed: Power9 has a lot of latency behind its units: it is always 2-cycles or 3-cycles of latency (while EPYC or Skylake have many operations with 1-cycle of latency, like add or subtract). Power9 relies upon instruction-level parallelism to get things done.
So there are a few cases like the Rust Mandelbrot benchmark, which surely hits that latency problem, while the Rustlang Prime benchmark shows off the ILP goodness the system offers.
[1] https://wiki.raptorcs.com/w/images/8/89/POWER9_um_OpenPOWER_...
Some are SMT8. The ones that are supported by this motherboard are "only" SMT4 however.
I think its "OpenPOWER" chips are at least 4-threads per core.
So if you want something with published scores on a wide variety of benchmarks that are included in CPU2017 get an Epyc or a Xeon.
Is the power9 only competitive for integer related workloads? E950 finds results on the Integer throughput list, but not the FP throughput list.
Usually the description has a CPU entry something like "Intel Xeon Gold 6148". The IBM entries have things like "3.4 - 3.8 GHz, 40 core, SLES". So if you search any of the lists for "power9" you don't find anything.
Seems like Power9 does really well on interpreters.
I mean it really sucks that we cry for non-X86 desktops, and when someone finally delivers, we complain about price. It's just little hard to justify for something I'd basically buy as a "toy".
Compare to an Intel 16 thread CPU + motherboard with ECC RAM and the ability to address more than 64GB of RAM. You're well into Xeon parts probably in the $300-400 range just for the CPU, then to get a decent motherboard is probably another $200. So you're paying a 2x premium for this Raptor Computing offering, that's really not THAT bad of pricing!
This pricing is an order of magnitude better than some of the previous Raptor Computing POWER systems which will hopefully open up their market to a wider audience and help drive down prices in the future.
I genuinely hope this takes off, I would love to replace my primary desktop with a power system. And any way you slice it, this is just _AWESOME_.
1. All Intel and AMD CPU's are backdoored with management processors running black box software that's already had vulnerabilities. They refuse to remove the backdoors for consumer segment for probably shady reasons. These POWER CPU's have open-source firmware, OpenBMC, which is a little better on trust side. Personally, I think they're still backdoored somehow since IBM is one of NSA's longest-running partners. Still a risk reduction if we go from anyone might hit this closed software to open software anyone can analyze and improve.
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-...
2. People that want POWER ISA or just a RISC ISA at x86's performance. The x86 ISA is pretty horrible to some of us. It also locks you into specific patterns of execution, like its stack architecture, that can make it harder to efficiently implement alternative schemes. POWER could be more flexible for alternative designs.
2.1. PowerPC, like sold by NXP/Freescale, is still used in a lot of safety-critical fields along with sections of the embedded sector. While invisible to desktop programmers, it kept getting better and better for niches like with QorIQ CPU's for telecoms. I speculated developing on a POWER architecture for POWER-like targets might be easier somehow (idk though).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QorIQ
2.2. The separation kernels like INTEGRITY-178B were all originally designed for PowerPC boards like Curtis-Wright makes for aerospace and military. They might be easier to port in evaluated configuration to a Raptor than to x86. There are also a lot of hardware/software architectures for improving security that work better when you know what the hardware is doing in the first place and/or can modify the firmware. OpenPOWER has more potential for these designs with the main drawback being CompSci folks usually not able to afford expensive, new computers. Somebody might port an existing idea, though, that they were doing on MIPS, Leon3, ARM, etc.
2.3. The Amiga people also use PowerPC-based machines. They're willing to pay a premium to maintain their nostalgia. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ports MorphOS or something like that to these machines.
So, there's a few ideas.
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id...
Might be fun to see AmigaOS on one of these too.
Having more than 64 GB of ram will cost twice as much as the motherboard+cpu.
Those are "only" 8 threads, but I doubt the 16 thread/4 core POWER processors are much better in practice than Intel's 8 thread/4 core processors.
Sure it costs something, though.
> 2 Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet ports > 1 Isolated BMC Gigabit Ethernet port
What does 'isolated' mean in the context? AFAIK ethernet connections are always isolated using transformers, so I don't suppose they are talking about galvanic isolation here.
Can anyone elaborate?
I think this research was where I heard about this:
https://lwn.net/Articles/630778/
Having the port shared can save in cabling, but you trade that off for trusting some firmware to do the right thing.
Isolated ports mean that you can have one cable that goes to the BMC and only the BMC, and one that goes to the host and only the host. i.e. you place trust for isolation in the fact that two cables go to two different places, and don't involve another bit of firmware.
> Expected to ship late Q1 2019
OCuLink can turn into M.2, U.2, or a variety of SATA connectors.
More information on FlexVer: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve...
> FlexVer™ is a new, owner-controlled security technology designed to safeguard critical data and applications in the event of software or hardware tampering. FlexVer™ allows a system to be provisioned in a trusted physical environment, then deployed to an untrustworthy physical location while retaining system integrity.
Most systems assume a minimal level of 3D acceleration support for desktop use. Watching video, browsing the web, etc... could suck down a lot more CPU than you're used to.
NBD if you're using it as a server, but problematic as a daily driver desktop.
On a slightly different topic, I'm not sure this push to force libre software into requiring a 3D GPU is a good idea while every 3D capable card / chip currently being made relies on proprietary firmware enforcing various forms of DRM. If at some point the already existing DRM starts being extended to protect modern 3D support (e.g consider no 4k /8k 3D allowed without DRM handshake), there is no reasonable fallback for the desktop (leaving games etc. aside); this is not a good place to be IMO.
the BMC chip (ast2500) has support for being a GPU for the host processor. It's a good old pretty dumb 2D framebuffer. Good for running an OS installer on.
Because (currently, we're working on it) boot time is more than a couple of seconds before we could bring up a discrete GPU, this connector will get you boot progress (and let you see an error) that occurs before we could fire up a PCIe GPU.
However, at $799 + 4-cores or 8-cores, the main purpose of this board is for "toy" uses. There's no way that the 4-core IBM is going to be anywhere as fast as a 16c/32t Threadripper 1950x (going for ~$450 these days btw), but it would be the cheapest machine to build for the Power9 system.
So that alone is important. The "Basic" box would be for developer machines, while the "production" machine would be 22-core, or maybe 12-core SMT8 (the "thicker" IBM design where 8-SMT is possible).
Consider this: what if you were developing for Summit? Do you want to rent supercomputer time when you're writing your code? Or do you test it out on a cheaper 4-core, $799 motherboard machine? https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/
For some applications, the compute performance is secondary to that, but price always plays a role. A moderately powerful workstation that runs 100% audited code is very desirable for some uses.
Having such a powerful (or at least performant), free and risc-y machine has been a dream of mine for quite some time now... If I can only find a good argument to my wife as why we need one :P
Oh nice! Almost 2x the speed of i9 for 7-Zip compression and ahead of everyone on LLVM compilation speed and Rust prime benchmarks.
Edit: It was a Lian-Li PC-06SX and not an 05!