Comment by perryh2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by perryh2 | Hacker News Reader

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For those that do not know, IBM processors are used in high-performance computing applications. Some of the world's fastest supercomputers are based on POWER [1]. These supercomputers can have hundreds of thousands or even millions of cores for massively parallel computing. We've seen recently from some of these systems that the POWER processors are much more effective than x86 processors. They consume lower power and generate less heat. If combined with Nvidia GPU's for CUDA and Mellanox's commodity InifiniBand interconnect hardware, we could have affordable clusters for heterogenous high-performance computing.

In the past, the supercomputers/clusters sold by IBM do not include hardware from these other companies. I think this partnership with Tyan (major manufacturer of current x86 chipsets) will also allow 3rd-party vendors to build systems with IBM POWER processors.

In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have its own niche in the market.

[1] http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/

We've seen recently from some of these systems that the POWER processors are much more effective than x86 processors. They consume lower power and generate less heat.

In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have its own niche in the market.

Look at that Top500 list again and compare #1 (x86) and #3 (POWER). #1 has about double the number of cores, performance and power usage. I'd say the high-end Xeons are comparable to POWER in all aspects.

The computer in the #1 spot was recently announced in China and sports Intel's Xeon Phi coprocessors, which include many cores per unit. The system in the #3 spot uses all cpu's and is completely homogenous. I worked in HPC at LLNL last year and saw the POWER processors. They are very small units and don't draw nearly as much power as Intel Xeon series.

Here's a picture of the Sequoia machine: http://imgur.com/6UrZndM

Each of those cards is a single node in the cluster.

Great perspective. Any more to share on your view how will POWER changes, i still dont see it goes anywhere apart from HPC. And being solely used in HPC just isn't a variable long term strategy.

Another worthwhile list to look at is the Green500 [1], which ranks machines based on MFLOPS/Watt. With the exception of a few GPU and Xeon Phi heavy machines at the top, the high end is dominated by IBM's Blue Gene machines.

[1] http://www.green500.org/lists/green201306&green500from=1&gre...

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