Hacker News Reader

Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

I’m really quite dismayed by the purely x86/x64-centric viewpoint.

No mention of POWER9, for example (my own personal favourite), which I’m running on my workstation (https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/)

There’s several other ISAs out there (ARM, obviously, but desktop-, let alone workstation-class chips are hard at least for now a dicy proposition).

EDIT: Surprised by all the downvotes. Is mentioning anything outside the domain of x86 considered controversial nowadays?!

View on HN

Judging people for not sharing your non-mainstream preferences is not a great way to earn points.

POWER9 is very interesting, especially with it's open licensing. It's even in the relative price and performance category as Intel Xeons, and I'm hopeful that POWER10 on Samsung 7nm will also be competitive.

But POWER9 doesn't have the software compatibility that x86 does, nor is it remotely close in price or performance to AMD. At best, POWER9 might receive a special mention as a niche product (along with the Arm Ampere workstation[0]).

Also, RaptorCS has had problems with their support process. I know they've been working on it, but that doesn't mean they've worked through all of the teething issues.

[0]https://www.anandtech.com/show/15737/arm-development-for-the...

Does it outperform the fastest x64 chips? I presume it was far more expensive?

I like the idea of a POWER9 desktop machine, but I don't see the pricepoint ever getting to the point where I'd seriously consider one.

POWER9 and talos were interesting before the launch of ryzen, but now you can get 32 faster cores vs 8 slower cores for around the same price, its no contest whatsoever for the vast majority of people.

I am sorry to be so blunt, but you clearly have no understanding of the importance of having a fully open and auditable high performance system without any remote management devices or dark corners in the hardware or the firmware for backdoors to lurk in.

First class expensive. Lobotomy of the masses comprehensive. Economy cheap, more money to keep.

The talos II absolutely has a remote management openBMC controller, second 99.9% of people absolutely do not care about this sorta thing, for better or worse, it has nothing to do with me.

POWER9 is a niche within a niche. I guess they ignored it for that reason.

Yes, and if everybody continues to ignore it because it’s a niche within a niche, it’s doomed to stay that way and probably become extinct.

> it’s doomed to stay that way and probably become extinct

Well yes, it probably is. That's another reason why everyone is ignoring it.

Actually POWER won’t die, because it has IBM behind it and the POWER architecture forms the backbone of their highly profitable mainframe and high-end server business.

What I was referring to as possibly dying was POWER on the desktop generally, and Raptor/Talos specifically.

IBM Z mainframes don’t use the POWER architecture, but have their own z/Architecture instruction set and CPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

So are the market rules.

I also don't like that some languages have become a niche within a niche with similar consequences.

It's not the job of workstation buyers to subsidize niche architectures.

For those prices my iMac Pro definitely performs better. And it's somewhat overpriced, too.

Nobody will consider an alternative platform until it becomes affordable.

Not really. iMac Pro is Intel chips, and there's pretty much no Intel chip that beats AMD on price/performance.

Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)

> Not really. iMac Pro is Intel chips, and there's pretty much no Intel chip that beats AMD on price/performance.

Well, now this is the case, yes. Wasn't when I bought the iMac Pro. It's a very respectable machine and it has the same drawbacks as the Threadripper -- only 4 channels of memory (with 10c/20t CPU).

> Intel's main selling point is AVX512 support, which is a niche but it does provide benefits in some workloads. AMD's "more cores" approach is probably superior in most applications however. (It gets complicated: AVX512 uses more power, causing frequency drops. But SIMD-parallelism is innately more power-efficient than more cores... it depends on how much your computer uses AVX512, how sensitive it is to frequency slowdowns... etc. etc)

Heard about that, it's quite embarrassing for Intel. As for SIMD itself, it's a sad story. Most, if not 99%, of the compilers out there don't utilise it. Makes me want to contribute to a compiler but I can't seem to find such a job, especially having never done it before.

This is quite a disappointment indeed. Turns out that compilers only use like 10% of the instructions in x86. While there are some efforts to fix this (at least for SIMD) with better heuristics, I fear that the best way to solve this might be to go with simpler ISAs and drive up the clock speed.

Absolutely. I feel that all the ~7.7k opcodes for x86_64 aren't helping things at all.

I had high hopes for RISC-V but I already heard the usual BS about "extensions that vendors may choose to implement or not" and I kind of lost hope. :(

Why do you like power9? What advantages does it have over x86?

What OS do you run on it? Is it hard to find software that works on it?

I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 for POWER9. You start from a server ISO and build up from there.

https://ubuntu.com/download/server/power

I don't have first-hand experience, but I saw a screenshot on Twitter of a Fedora system running on a Raptor workstation. The owner said he had no issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com