Hands On With The Most Open-Source, High-Performance System For 2018

[madscientist159]

So direct comparison would be threadripper, not epyc. Ok, noted, thanks.

While it's not really common knowledge yet, we're also working on a LaGrange box (8 channels) designed to the same libre-friendly standards as Talos and Blackbird. I don't have more information I can publicly share yet, but let's just leave it at ecosystem building takes time, and the Sforza offering was the best balance for the initial launch. It's still quite the beast and very competitive with AMD's offerings.

[pegasus]

Nice. I actually have an intention to get a decent dual epyc pc next year for my CFD hobby but dual P9 would fit my needs as well. Mark me as "interested".

[torsionbar28]

I ask because frankly I haven’t heard much at since the PowerPC days.

Like intel's MMX being superseded by SSE3/4, Altivec has been superseded by the newer VMX and VSX on Power ISA.

[Dawn]

Like intel's MMX being superseded by SSE3/4, Altivec has been superseded by the newer VMX and VSX on Power ISA.

Not quite; VMX is actually a synonym for AltiVec (although it's grown somewhat since Apple's day), and VSX complements (mostly with FP ops, although not entirely) rather than replaces it.

[torsionbar28]

Not quite; VMX is actually a synonym for AltiVec (although it's grown somewhat since Apple's day), and VSX complements (mostly with FP ops, although not entirely) rather than replaces it.

Sure, I was referring more to the terminology. wizard69 said he hasn't heard much about Altivec lately. My point was more that it hasn't gone away, rather you just don't see it branded and marketed as such any more, just as you don't see intel advertising "Core i9 with MMX technology".

[darkbasic]

While it's not really common knowledge yet, we're also working on a LaGrange box (8 channels) designed to the same libre-friendly standards as Talos and Blackbird. I don't have more information I can publicly share yet, but let's just leave it at ecosystem building takes time, and the Sforza offering was the best balance for the initial launch. It's still quite the beast and very competitive with AMD's offerings.

Agree, it's quite competitive right now. Unfortunately 8 channels will be a must once the new 48-64 cores / 8 channels Threadripper gets released.

[Maddo]

While it's not really common knowledge yet, we're also working on a LaGrange box (8 channels) designed to the same libre-friendly standards as Talos and Blackbird. I don't have more information I can publicly share yet, but let's just leave it at ecosystem building takes time, and the Sforza offering was the best balance for the initial launch. It's still quite the beast and very competitive with AMD's offerings.

While we are on topic, I have a question if you don't mind. I'm fairly interested in a raptor workstation however what I want to ask is: is it worth the investment? I've seen the titanic leap over this few years from openpower being just a website to now being able to run UE4 on it. However what I want to ask is: with AIX which seems on its last breath, and x86 which will probably remain dominant due to it being cheaper (due to mass production) and where most of the software was written, what would make OpenPOWER different from, say, OpenSPARC? I know it's probably a dumb question, but I'm an outsider to the whole IT world, I just had to deal and know about POWER when doing biomedical research on a P8 machine and it was amazing. I still don't see Linux on POWER as a valid alternative to AIX, but I've been outside the loop for two years so I'm probably missing a few pieces of the puzzle. So once again, is it worth it to buy a talos as a workstation and main PC? Does x86 emulation work and in which state? Is it able to run 3D intensive applications such as games or imaging programs? Sorry if it was abrupt but I can't really seem to find much up to date information ;;

[classichasclass]

While we are on topic, I have a question if you don't mind. I'm fairly interested in a raptor workstation however what I want to ask is: is it worth the investment? I've seen the titanic leap over this few years from openpower being just a website to now being able to run UE4 on it. However what I want to ask is: with AIX which seems on its last breath, and x86 which will probably remain dominant due to it being cheaper (due to mass production) and where most of the software was written, what would make OpenPOWER different from, say, OpenSPARC? I know it's probably a dumb question, but I'm an outsider to the whole IT world, I just had to deal and know about POWER when doing biomedical research on a P8 machine and it was amazing. I still don't see Linux on POWER as a valid alternative to AIX, but I've been outside the loop for two years so I'm probably missing a few pieces of the puzzle. So once again, is it worth it to buy a talos as a workstation and main PC? Does x86 emulation work and in which state? Is it able to run 3D intensive applications such as games or imaging programs? Sorry if it was abrupt but I can't really seem to find much up to date information ;;

AIX is hardly on its last legs. It's not really a growth platform anymore and that's reflected in IBM's purchase of Red Hat, but it's at least as strong as any of the other legacy proprietary Un*x OSes like Solaris and HP-UX (arguably stronger, in some sectors).

That said, as an AIX admin since 3.2.5, modern Linux may not have the same tooling or philosophies but that doesn't mean Linux isn't perfectly capable as an enterprise OS. In fact, as someone running AIX hardware now, its probable replacement will be a Linux (or maybe BSD: we'll see) POWER system because IBM keeps trying to hustle purchasers into $ervice contract$.

x86 emulation works fine because it's QEMU. Anything you can do on QEMU, you can do here. I run ReactOS and Windows apps in that, so as QEMU improves, so will the state of x86 on the Talos II (or, for that matter, anything that's not x86 apart from various vendor-specific runtimes).

The chief problem with OpenSPARC is that Oracle's heart isn't in it. The last OpenSPARC chip so far was the T2 in 2008, and Oracle hasn't seen fit to issue any others. Meanwhile, POWER9 is truly kick-ass, up-to-date and actually competitive with current x86_64 offerings in capacity, computation and even power usage. The Sforza chips are flexible enough to appear in lots of form factors and the Red Hat purchase almost certainly means ppc64le is going to be a first-class citizen for more and more Linux distros as the work to support it moves back into the tree. If you're going to bet on a horse, this is the one.

Cameron Kaiser

[chuckatkins]

I'd like to see some benchmarks with some of the closed source compiler options nopw available. Both PGI and XL have community licenses available now and target PPC. XL, specifically, since numerical and scientific codes are heavily targeting XL on POWER machines.

[Guest]

Any zswap/zram benchmarks? I've heard POWER can compress better due to special hardware/instructions.