If only this had happened as Opteron was taking a beating in the server market.
Now with EPYC Rome, I wonder just how many takers IBM will have.
Now with EPYC Rome, I wonder just how many takers IBM will have.
Because it's hard to beat the x86 mammoth for so many reasons (on top of my head):
- huge market share in servers/workstations
- Intel has more resources than pretty much anyone else
- AMD is now back in the game and started a core/performance/price war with intel
- x86 is "cheap"
- market shares for "cheaper" stuff will probably be taken by ARM and RISC-V
- so much time was invested in optimizing compiler, code and so on for x86 because that's what everyone has
- the Torvalds argument which is to say developper "will happily pay a bit more for x86 cloud hosting, simply because it matches what you can test on your own local setup, and the errors you get will translate better,". So as long as you don't have cheap Power workstations, it'll be a moot point. I remember working on AlphaPC and pretty much nothing was 64 bits clean back then, it was a huge mess. Now that part is solved but not everything else...
I definitely get the appeal for the Googles of the world to challenge Intel and for niche (internal) products, and for myself because honestly I don't really need an intel compatible CPU but in the long run, I am not sure it'll go anywhere...
Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud…
but both of those are really expensive, so instead I have a MACCHIATObin at home & AWS Graviton in the cloud. ARM is winning :P
> optimizing compiler, code and so on
Fun fact, IBM is paying large amounts of cash on BountySource for SIMD optimizations of various things for POWER: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm
But ARM is winning again: many things, especially the more user-facing ones, are already optimized thanks to smartphones. For POWER, the TenFourFox author is I think still working on SpiderMonkey's baseline JIT. For ARM (AArch64), IonMonkey (full smart JIT) is already enabled, developed by Mozilla, thanks to both Android phones and the new Windows-Qualcomm laptops: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536220
Yeah but there's a HUGE but: the motherboard and CPU (1S/4C/16T) and heatsink alone are $1.4k, no RAM no case no HD no nothing (I found a guy who spec'ed one for $2.1k with everything you'd need for a reasonable workstation). So unless you have a massive good reason or interest (political, because POWER, your company runs on POWER, "f*ck" x86, ...) to run your code on POWER, I don't see why you'd spend that much while you could get better for a lot less.
And the only way it'll get cheaper is to mass produce it: let's be realistic, as much as I'd want to have a POWER workstation or laptop (hey, there were SPARC and Thinkpad PowerPC laptops so why not), I won't be holding my breath while I wait...
(okay, not only because of the price, also because I just like the A64 ISA and UEFI)
The SolidRun MACCHIATObin is not nearly as powerful — it's ultrabook-grade performance, not server-grade — but it works fine for coding & browsing, and it's also quite open — the only blob in the firmware is something tiny and irrelevant (and I'm pretty sure for some secondary processor), everything on the ARM cores post-ROM (including RAM training code) I have built from source.
Yeah, it's low volume and Raptor needs to pay their employees — but $1100 for a mainboard? Come on. Maybe they should have dropped PCIe Gen 4 from the Blackbird at least.
Enough people are buying, which means the price is just right (Capitalism 101).
If you trust Intel and AMD, without an SLA, to keep your data private all I'll say is that's quite naive. Even the HDMI master key leaked, do you really expect the ME and PSP signing keys not to fall into the wrong hands at any point?
Yes, the mainboards are expensive. That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance. Blackbird lowers that barrier to entry some as well.
Again, Rome has a mandatory PSP blob that cannot be removed (any UEFI toggles that say otherwise are not accurate -- the PSP must run before the x86 cores even come out of reset). If you're OK with that loss of control, my gut impression is that use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns ;). At that point, why not just lease cloud space on a major provider that can offer that compute power even cheaper than a local machine which sits idle overnight?
> local machine which sits idle overnight
um, I thought we're talking about workstations here. I power mine off when unused.
> use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns
This is based on two rather odd assumptions:
- Microsoft as the default: No, I grew up with Unix, Unix is my default choice just because I know it and I'm used to it;
- owner control on all levels being equally important: meh, there's a lot more that you'd want to tweak in the kernel and up the stack. I wouldn't know what to change in firmware. I have changed many little things in the FreeBSD kernel (and contributed them). The only thing I ever changed in the UEFI firmware on my ARM box is some ACPI tables to fix compatibility.
> That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance
That sounds vague ;)
Also, what's "high performance" about the board anyway? PCIe Gen 4? On a typical developer workstation that's kind of a waste, Gen 3 is plenty.
Good providers will still allow you to run an accelerated VM inside the leased VPS, so you could still do your kernel hacking there.
I'm simply saying there's something interesting here -- you care enough about owning (I use that term loosely) a machine to spend more on a local system, but not enough to obtain one that you can freely modify as desired. Clearly there is a threshold, and I'm curious where it lies. :)
> accelerated VM inside the leased VPS
Does that work on POWER?
> they can provide lower cost
They can but they won't. They like having huge profits. Even if they offer the base VPS for cheap (Spot instances) they rip you off on storage, bandwidth, IP addresses, etc.
Also, again, desktops. I like developing directly on a desktop workstation. I can't exactly insert my Radeon into a PCIe slot in the cloud and run a DisplayPort cable from the cloud to my monitor :)
Stadia seems to think it can push a high resolution monitor like stream over a network interface. I'm playing devils advocate of course here but fundamentally if you don't have control of the hardware there's no long term advantage to local compute, at least not with current market trends etc. Everything points to a move back to dumb terminals for consumer use at this point -- in the past it would have at least been possible to hack those terminals to run some minimal (for the time) OS, but crypto locking of the terminal hardware stops that quite cold.
But still, that didn't prevent POWER9 from being in one of the largest supercomputers. And super wide SIMD has its disadvantages (hello AVX Offset downclocking)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP...
They have cornered at least 85% of that market...
And most likely, it's the nVidia connection with NVLink which matters most in there if we talk about SIMD...
They said it better than I could (in June of 2018): https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-accelerated-supercompute...
In the latest TOP500 rankings announced this week, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running in new supercomputers – that according to the Nvidians, who enjoy keeping track of such things. In this case, most of those additional flops came from three top systems new to the list: Summit, Sierra, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI).
Summit, the new TOP500 champ, pushed the previous number one system, the 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight, into second place with a Linpack score of 122.3 petaflops. Summit is powered by IBM servers, each one equipped with two Power9 CPUs and six V100 GPUs. According to NVIDIA, 95 percent of the Summit’s peak performance (187.7 petaflops) is derived from the system’s 27,686 GPUs. (emphasis mine, Summit being a POWER9 supercomputer with 4608 nodes with 2 POWER9 and 6 V100 in each)
There are already manufacturers who have licensed the EPYC IP from AMD, but a for-free design could be compelling.
Seeing the number of design wins m68k racked up, it would have been the logical choice (and ISTR that IBM actually liked it better, but it and its peripherals were more expensive). Disclaimer: not a fan of any of these architectures.
EDIT: typo
1) OS from the start. Develop in the open. Maybe lock some features behind a paywall.
2) OS when something is not hot anymore. Take your formerly private stuff you charged a lot of money for, and because so much better stuff has come out.. meh, let's OS it.
This is clearly a case of #2....
In the late 80s/early 90s when POWER appeared, and RISC fever was in full swing, if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least.
Well that was basically the PPC consortium. I'm not sure how much apple/motorola/etc paid to be part of it, but the idea was to build a common ISA from multiple vendors.
POWER is hot, IBM is probably just confident that someone else producing competing compatible chips and taking all their customers is not a real threat / completely outweighed by the benefits of an open ecosystem (including more compatible but different segment (low-power) chips)
Don't downplay the work that goes into complex software.
I'm talking about the barrier to entry.
You don't think Torvalds could have gotten paid for programming in the time he spent writing Linux?
What is the sum of all the time invested into Linux * the average hourly rate?
I can write a tiny blog engine in a day on my existing computer. I can't walk into Global Foundries and ask them to make me a single wafer of my tiny microcontroller on their 14nm process.
Hobby software is on the same playing field as pro software, and can smoothly become pro software like Linux did. Hobby silicon is on the 1970s playing field - Jeri Ellsworth and Sam Zeloof making a few transistors with size measured in micrometers. There is literally no way to make your own "hello world" in modern performance silicon.